is this a good idea?

Hello,

I have a free running hardware timer on a LPC2478 (timers are 32 bit). no interrupts related to that timer are used.

can the following code corrupt the value latched from
the hardware timer, if the timer ticks just when the copy is done? can it cause a misbehavior of the loop? I know this is not a good programming example - I'm just curious.

unsigned long timer_value_ref = T2TC ;

do
{
}
while (T2TC - timer_value_ref < 1000) ;