Whenever you write a succinct example or a metaphor to try to explain in a few words a complicated concept, someone will nitpick small details of your construct

Whenever you write a succinct example or a metaphor to try to explain in a few words a complicated concept, someone will nitpick small details of your construction, thus focusing on the form and missing the spirit! Forget if "i<n" is decidable or not: the sense is that there will always be some loops that the compiler can't determine if it's finite or not. Forget if A and B can alias or not: the sense is having two independent actions that can be executed in the same loop or in two consecutive loops. Let's see... what about the following example, that replaces all a's with @ and all e's with & in a zero-terminated string s? for (char *p=s; *p; p++) if (*p=='a') *p='@'; for (char *p=s; *p; p++) if (*p=='e') *p='&'; If a compiler is allowed to assume that the first loop terminates, then it may optimize it to: for (char *p=s; *p; p++) { if (*p=='a') *p='@'; if (*p=='e') *p='&'; } Is this explanation less insane?