Array of booleans

Question

I have an array of booleans defined as follows:-
Boolean [] isComplete = new Boolean[noOfBooleans];What I am trying to do is to continue a loop till all the values of this array are set to true. What I have tried is
do {
    for (int i = 0; i < isComplete.length; i++) {
        if(isComplete) {
break;
}while(true);
but it would break if anyof these booleans is true and I am not sure how to put an && condition in there. Any help would be great.
Edited by: LisaM on Nov 10, 2009 11:26 AM                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Answer 1

LisaM wrote:
^you are right, actually I am dealing with threads here, what I am trying to do is to start a number of independant threads, and as these threads complete set the isComplete boolean to true. But I am unable to check when all the threads have finished. If you want to wait for the thread to complete, as opposed to just knowing when they complete, use Thread.join:
List<Thread> threadList = new ArrayList<Thread>();
for (...) {
  Thread th = new Thread(...);
  th.start();
  threadList.add(th);
for (Thread th : threadList) {
  th.join();
// when we get here, all the threads we started are doneAs for your code, if you do decide to continue with your initial approach (fixing the code so it actually works, of course), I have a few suggestions.
1. A busy-wait loop like that will kill performance. Use wait/notify or sleep so that test loop doesn't eat up all your CPU.
2. You'll have to synchronize all access to the array, otherwise the testing thread may never see the writing threads' updates.
3. You may want to use BitSet instead of an array. It seems a little cleaner to me, but it won't make any real difference. You'll still have to sync all access to it.
Finally, depending one what you're really trying to do, you may find some of the tools in the java.util.concurrent packages easier to work with than this low-level threading stuff.