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Comment by maddynator | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. whats the use case of this?

Well, no particular use case I can think of. The OP asked for anything that you find interesting so here we are. =)

I'm sure there is a use for it, that pattern may be representative of some other phenomenon in the universe that we haven't correlated it to as of yet.

Well there is this famous paper by Volovich [1] where he argues that space is basically pixelized and p-adic numbers might best describe their geometry. But of course this has no connection with the reality we have access to. p-adic numbers are also used in various areas of number theory (not my expertise). I see them like the lesser known sibling of real numbers.

[1] https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/volovich1.pdf

If it's proven then we can add a new pointless compiler optimization (some of them are already allowed to assume some things never terminate, even)

llvm skips it entirely.

https://twitter.com/badamczewski01/status/142826257042792857...

It can easily be proven for all valid values of int (of a specific limited size).

What's the most pointless compiler optimization you're aware of?

(Obviously a subjective question in practice, so chances are you might need to add a bit of qualification)

Infinite loops are considered undefined behaviour in C++.

Infinite loops are undefined (actually, undecidable) behaviour in any Turing machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

That's not what undefined behavior means.

Surely it's true for every unsigned 64-bit integer.

Impressing ladies at the bar with your 'deep connection'.

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