Forget 42, –1 is My New Answer to Life
I’ve just stumbled upon the next code statement – Thread.Sleep(-1). It left me wondering what was happening there since MSDN tells you nothing about a –1 value for the milliseconds parameter:
“The number of milliseconds for which the thread is blocked. Specify zero (0) to indicate that this thread should be suspended to allow other waiting threads to execute. Specify Infinite to block the thread indefinitely.“ – System.Threading.Thread.Sleep, MSDN
To check that out, I opened the IronRuby interactive console and filled in System::Threading::Thread.Sleep(-1) and hit Enter just to find out that this call blocks the thread indefinitely. Could it be? –1 is Infinite?
Reflector to our aid! oh wait, RedGate now charges money for it and had planted a time bomb inside the free version which made it stop working. grrrr
ILSpy to our aid! (I highly recommend ILSpy as a Reflector alternative… very similar, free, oss… great community effort!)
Anyway, ILSpy proved my concerns:
So… –1 actually represents Infinity (when it comes to threading in .NET). And Infinity is much cooler than 42, hence –1 is the new answer to life.
Q.E.D.
All the best,
Shay.