Comment by kiratp | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by kiratp | Hacker News Reader

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A for loop has a conditional in it.

Unless by conditionals we mean “no if/else” and not “no branch instructions”.

The conditional here only makes it stop when it reaches 100. The solution can be adapted to use a while loop if you’re okay with it running indefinitely.

A loop either never halts or has a conditional. I guess a compiler could elide a “while True:” to a branch-less jump instruction.

One hack would be to use recursion and let stack exhaustion stop you.

Count down i from 100 to 0 and do 1/i at the end of the loop :)

Other would be to use goto (though Python doesn't have it) & introduce something that will panic/throw exception, like creating variable with value 1/(max-i).

Recursion would work for that, you don't need goto.

The division by zero trick is pretty good too!

You could allocate 100 bytes and get a segfault on 101

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