Is using a while block to do nothing a bad thing?

Question

I\'m currently working through the excercises in \'The C Programming Language\'. Here\'s one of my solutions:

int c;

while ((c=getchar()) != EOF) {

if (c == \         


        

Answer 1

Your question "Is using a while block to do nothing a bad thing?" may also be answered in terms of wasting CPU cycles. In this case the answer is "No", since, the process will sleep while it waits for the user to input a character.

The process will wake only after a character is input. Then the test will occur and if the test passes, i.e. c == ' ', the process will go to sleep again until a the next character is entered. This repeats until a non-space character is entered.