[fpc-devel] Debugging Loop Unroll Optimization

[Ondrej Pokorny]

On 18.05.2018 13:28, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> In our previous episode, Mattias Gaertner said:
>>> ISO7185: "After a for-statement is executed, other than being left by a goto-statement, the
>>> control-variable shall be undefined"
>>>
>>> http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Tokyo/en/Declarations_and_Statements_(Delphi)#For_Statements:
>>> "After the for statement terminates (provided this was not forced by a Break or an Exit procedure),
>>> the value of counter is undefined."
>>>
>>> So this shall not be unrolled, but is still error prone, if Result is not set after the regular end of the for loop.
>> To avoid misunderstandings:
>> The above clearly says, that using break/goto/exit is safe:
>
> Well, well, clearly. One could interpret it that it says that the for
> statement terminates naturally if not forced by break or exit.  It doesn't
> say what happens with break or exit.

Sometimes I feel that FPC developers are more lawyers than programmers.

> The fact that this exception is not documented with an example makes it very
> ambiguous IMHO.

Your very own documentation isn't ambiguous at all, though: 
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu58.html#x164-18600013.2.4 [^]

Citation: "If the loop was terminated prematurely with an exception or a 
break statement, the loop variable retains the value it had when the 
loop was exited."

Ondrej