The feeling here seems to be that "for-loop tricks" are not a good idea, mainly because of readability. I disagree. I'm talking about the "idea" of for-loop tri

The feeling here seems to be that "for-loop tricks" are not a good idea, mainly because of readability. I disagree. I'm talking about the "idea" of for-loop tricks, not the specific ones shown in the article. For-loops are used in really limited ways, but they should be used much more often. Programmer should be better versed in how for loops work, the fact that you can add multiple expressions between each semi-color (;), etc. The reason is, for-loops are the most readable constructs for looping. Here's why: For-loops are the one loop construct which give you all the information about the looping at once. Used smartly, you can read the first line of the for-loop, and discover everything that the programmer would like to do, that has to do with the looping. For example, adding two variables to be incremented in a for-loop is trivial: for (int i=0, int b=10; i==10; i++,b++) This can also be done outside of the for-loop declaration, e.g. as the first line inside the for-loop. However, for smart programmers, this signals, to me, that "b" is another variable having to do with the loop that I would like incremented each time. In other words, it gives me more info. Other good uses can include checking two conditions, checking conditions with side-effects (e.g. instead of i++, use word=read_word_from_file()), etc. Lots of people are uncomfortable with these in a for-loop, but I maintain that's the best construct for these kinds of things, since it gives you all the info you need to understand the loop at one point only.