これは恐ろしいインタビューの質問ですが、実際には非常に興味深いものです。
static unsigned char buffer[256];
int main(void)
{
unsigned char *p, *q;
q = (p = buffer) + sizeof(buffer);
/* This statement will set p to point to the beginning of buffer and will
set q to point to one past the last element of buffer (this is legal) */
while (q - p)
/* q - p will start out being 256 and will decrease at an inversely
exponential rate: */
{
p = buffer;
while (!++*p++);
/* This is where the interesting part comes in; the prefix increment,
dereference, and logical negation operators all have the same
precedence and are evaluated **right-to-left**. The postfix
operator has a higher precedence. *p starts out at zero, is
incremented to 1 by the prefix, and is negated by !.
p is incremented by the postfix operator, the condition
evaluates to false and the loop terminates with buffer[0] = 1.
p is then set to point to buffer[0] again and the loop continues
until buffer[0] = 255. This time, the loop succeeds when *p is
incremented, becomes 0 and is negated. This causes the loop to
run again immediately after p is incremented to point to buffer[1],
which is increased to 1. The value 1 is of course negated,
p is incremented which doesn't matter because the loop terminates
and p is reset to point to buffer[0] again.
This process will continue to increment buffer[0] every time,
increasing buffer[1] every 256 runs. After 256*255 runs,
buffer[0] and buffer[1] will both be 255, the loop will succeed
*twice* and buffer[2] will be incremented once, etc.
The loop will terminate after about 256^256 runs when all the values
in the buffer array are 255 allowing p to be incremented to the end
of the array. This will happen sometime after the universe ends,
maybe a little sooner on the new Intels ;)
*/
}
return p - q;
/* Returns 0 as p == q now */
}
基本的に、これは 256 桁の base-256 (8 ビット バイトを想定) カウンターであり、プログラムはカウンター全体が「ロールオーバー」すると終了します。
これが興味深い理由は、コードが実際には完全に合法的な C であり (これらのタイプの質問で通常見られる未定義または実装定義の動作がない)、実際には正当なアルゴリズムの問題が混在しているためです。これが恐ろしいインタビューの質問である理由は、while ステートメントに含まれる演算子の優先順位と結合規則を誰も覚えていないと思うからです。しかし、それは楽しくて洞察に満ちた小さなエクササイズになります。