Question

What is the output of the following code fragment?

int x=0;
while( x < 5)
cout << x << endl;
x ++;
cout << x << endl;
a) 0
b) 5
c) 4
d) infinite loop

Answer 1

The code contains a while loop without curly braces, causing an infinite loop that prints '0' indefinitely. The final print statement outside the loop would print '1' if the loop were to be terminated.

Step-by-step explanation:

The code provided is a C++ fragment that includes a while loop. The loop is supposed to increment the value of x while x is less than 5 and print each value of x before incrementing. However, due to a missing set of curly braces '{ }' after the while statement, the loop will only consider the 'cout << x << endl;' as its body. This means that the x++ statement is outside of the loop, which will result in an infinite loop, continually printing '0'. After forcefully terminating the loop, the 'cout << x << endl;' that follows will print '1' since x at that point would have been incremented once.