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

The canonical way — used since time immemorial, have a look, eg, at the Lyons book — is

while(condition)       // Here's the whole thing
    ;                  // empty body.

In fact, in general the 'semicolor on a separate line' convention is used for a null statement. You will, for example, occassionally see

if( condition-1)
     ;
else if (condition-2)
     stmt;
else {
     // do stuff here
}

It's a lot more uncommon, but shows up either where condition-1 is very complicated, so you don't want to negate it and chance confusion, or where the code has been hand-optimized within an inch of its life, so that you want the most common case first.

The

while(condition) ;

form is to be slavishly avoided, because that's a common and annoying typo: you should make it clear that you did it on purpose. Empty braces

 while(condition){
 }

or its variants, are also trouble because they either don't stand out enough, or worse lead to other typos.