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A condition precedent is an event or state of affairs that is required before something else will occur. In contract law, a condition precedent is an event which must occur, unless its non-occurrence is excused, before performance under a contract becomes due, i.e., before any contractual duty exists. [1]
In estate and trust law, it is a provision in a will or trust that prevents the vesting of a gift or bequest until something occurs or fails to occur, e.g. the attainment of a certain age or the predecease of another person. For comparison, a condition subsequent brings a duty to an end whereas a condition precedent initiates a duty.
In computing, a while loop is an instruction to check a condition precedent, then execute an action only if that check evaluates to 'true'; after which execution, control then returns to the beginning of the loop and the cycle of check and conditional execution begins again. By contrast, a do while loop first executes the action, next checks a condition subsequent, then returns control to the beginning of the loop if the check evaluated to 'true'. Either loop ends once a check is evaluated to 'false', after which control flow proceeds onward, now "outside" of the loop instruction.
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Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer and Eiffel Software. Meyer conceived the language in 1985 with the goal of increasing the reliability of commercial software development; the first version becoming available in 1986. In 2005, Eiffel became an ISO-standardized language.
In computing, an optimizing compiler is a compiler that tries to minimize or maximize some attributes of an executable computer program. Common requirements are to minimize a program's execution time, memory footprint, storage size, and power consumption.
In computer programming, an infinite loop is a sequence of instructions that, as written, will continue endlessly, unless an external intervention occurs, such as turning off power via a switch or pulling a plug. It may be intentional.
In computer science, control flow is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.
In computer architecture, predication is a feature that provides an alternative to conditional transfer of control, as implemented by conditional branch machine instructions. Predication works by having conditional (predicated) non-branch instructions associated with a predicate, a Boolean value used by the instruction to control whether the instruction is allowed to modify the architectural state or not. If the predicate specified in the instruction is true, the instruction modifies the architectural state; otherwise, the architectural state is unchanged. For example, a predicated move instruction will only modify the destination if the predicate is true. Thus, instead of using a conditional branch to select an instruction or a sequence of instructions to execute based on the predicate that controls whether the branch occurs, the instructions to be executed are associated with that predicate, so that they will be executed, or not executed, based on whether that predicate is true or false.
In computer programming, specifically when using the imperative programming paradigm, an assertion is a predicate connected to a point in the program, that always should evaluate to true at that point in code execution. Assertions can help a programmer read the code, help a compiler compile it, or help the program detect its own defects.
In the domain of central processing unit (CPU) design, hazards are problems with the instruction pipeline in CPU microarchitectures when the next instruction cannot execute in the following clock cycle, and can potentially lead to incorrect computation results. Three common types of hazards are data hazards, structural hazards, and control hazards.
In computer science, a NOP, no-op, or NOOP is a machine language instruction and its assembly language mnemonic, programming language statement, or computer protocol command that does nothing.
In computer science, conditionals are programming language commands for handling decisions. Specifically, conditionals perform different computations or actions depending on whether a programmer-defined Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. In terms of control flow, the decision is always achieved by selectively altering the control flow based on some condition . Although dynamic dispatch is not usually classified as a conditional construct, it is another way to select between alternatives at runtime. Conditional statements are the checkpoints in the programme that determines behaviour according to situation.
In computer science a for-loop or for loop is a control flow statement for specifying iteration. Specifically, a for loop functions by running a section of code repeatedly until a certain condition has been satisfied.
A race condition or race hazard is the condition of an electronics, software, or other system where the system's substantive behavior is dependent on the sequence or timing of other uncontrollable events, leading to unexpected or inconsistent results. It becomes a bug when one or more of the possible behaviors is undesirable.
The instruction cycle is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the execute stage.
In many computer programming languages, a do while loop is a control flow statement that executes a block of code and then either repeats the block or exits the loop depending on a given boolean condition.
In computer programming, COMEFROM is an obscure control flow structure used in some programming languages, originally as a joke. COMEFROM is the inverse of GOTO in that it can take the execution state from any arbitrary point in code to a COMEFROM statement.
A condition subsequent is a philosophical and legal term referring to a defined event which terminates a proposition or a contractual obligation. In contrast to a condition precedent, a condition subsequent brings the event to an end, rather than being necessary for to the event or obligation to occur.
In concurrent programming, a monitor is a synchronization construct that prevents threads from concurrently accessing a shared object's state and allows them to wait for the state to change. They provide a mechanism for threads to temporarily give up exclusive access in order to wait for some condition to be met, before regaining exclusive access and resuming their task. A monitor consists of a mutex (lock) and at least one condition variable. A condition variable is explicitly 'signalled' when the object's state is modified, temporarily passing the mutex to another thread 'waiting' on the conditional variable.
A data dependency in computer science is a situation in which a program statement (instruction) refers to the data of a preceding statement. In compiler theory, the technique used to discover data dependencies among statements is called dependence analysis.
Tracing just-in-time compilation is a technique used by virtual machines to optimize the execution of a program at runtime. This is done by recording a linear sequence of frequently executed operations, compiling them to native machine code and executing them. This is opposed to traditional just-in-time (JIT) compilers that work on a per-method basis.
Pacman is a side-channel vulnerability in certain ARM CPUs that was made public by Massachusetts Institute of Technology security researchers on June 10, 2021. It affects the pointer authentication (PAC) mechanism in many ARMv8.3 chips, including Apple's M1 CPU. Pacman creates an 'oracle' that lets an attacker guess a pointer's PAC signature without crashing the program if the guess is wrong. PAC signatures are typically less than 16 bits wide, so an attacker can use the oracle to guess the signature in 216 tries or fewer. It is unfixable without hardware changes because it is caused by the inherent design of CPU caches and branch predictors.