C Compilers Disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem

This is from John Regehr, University of Utah. High wonk factor. You already know whether you’re interested; go with your instinct.

C Compilers Disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem

Obviously I’m not serious: compilers are bad at solving high-level math problems and also there is good reason to believe this theorem cannot be disproved. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Recently — for reasons that do not matter here — I wanted to write C code for an infinite loop, but where the compiler was not to understand that the loop was infinite.  In contrast, if I had merely written

while (1) { }

(via Danny Yee)

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