Exactly. I think a lot of this noise is by non-practitioners of the language. The compiler is steel-manning this loop. It is generously interpreting the 4 as irrelevant, and deducing that the loop must always exit early. The author can’t possibly have meant to access beyond the end, because that’s not defined. QED. It seems altogether sensible to me.
Wow, I must congratulate you because this reads equally well both as a serious argument and as a parody of that argument.
So let me reply to your comment as if it were serious: yes, if the programmer by supernatural means knows that the "v" is always presented somewhere in the array, then this function works exactly as intended: it would always return true, and the compiler optimises it to do so as quickly as possible! But... perhaps there is some other way to pass such programmer's knowledge ("the arguments are guaranteed to be such that this loop is guaranteed to finish early") to the compiler in a more explicit way? Some sort of explicitly written assertion? A pre-condition? A contract, if you like?
See, it's very difficuly to maintain such unspoken contracts and invariants during the codebases' life because they're unspoken and unwritten. Comments barely count since compilers generally ignore them.
Thanks! I think anyone would have to be nuts to write a loop like this in C++ or tolerate C as a language. C++'s `ranges::find` does what it says, and communicates between the author and the reader as well as the author and the compiler.
