In the end, this only means the following: - The C spec permits this behaviour, the Java Spec doesn't - as a programmer, know the language and the spec tha

In the end, this only means the following: - The C spec permits this behaviour, the Java Spec doesn't - as a programmer, know the language and the spec that you use The destroying_world() example only shows that the programmer needs to know the language he is using. The optimization is in my opinion practical and reasonable in most cases. Every programmer that depends his program workflow and important decisions on the termination of an infinite loop should be bitch slapped to hell. Do you have another more reasonable example? The only example for the infinite loop i can think of is the eventloop of some network code. But i fail to see where any code over a few lines doesn't have any side effects.