How to overcome pointless C++ compiler warnings elegantly?

Question

This question is not bound to any specific compiler warning, the following is just an example.

Currently when I want a loop that checks an exit condition inside:

 while( true ) {     doSomething();     if( condition() ) {        break;     }     doSomethingElse(); } 

I can't just write that in Visual C++ - it will emit a C4127 conditional expression is constant warning. The compiler will wave it in my face although it's quite obvious that while(true) can't have been written accidentially.

Suppose I want code that compiles without warnings. There're workarounds at my service.

Workaround one is to use for(;;) but it feels stupid - why would I want that weird thing instead of concise elegant idiomatic while(true)? Workaround two is to use #pragma warning( suppress) before while( true ) line but it adds a huge banner that is twice as big as the while-statement itself. Workaround three is to disable C4127 for the entire project (I've seen it done in a real project) but then all possible useful instances of C4127 are also disabled.

Is there any elegant way to get rid of a pointless warning?

Answer 1

I'd write for(;;) because that's idiomatic.

Newer versions of Visual C++ are not as idiot as earlier versions were wrt. warnings. Visual C++ 10.0 compiles code that uses <windows.h>, at warning level 4, no warnings.

But if you want to turn off Visual C++ sillywarnings, take a look at my old anti-sillywarnings header, which was created with input from the [comp.lang.c++] community.

Answer 2

I'd go with for(;;) even without that warning. It's not stupid: it's a loop with no condition, which is exactly what you want to express.

That seems more logical to me than using a while loop and testing that true is still true each time round the loop (of course the compiler will optimize away this test, so it won't actually affect performance).