On 2007-12-12, Terry Reedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > "Steven D'Aprano" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >|| >| But loops that run at least once is a basic element of algorithms. >| Perhaps not as common as the zero or more times of the while loop, but >| still fundamental. It is a shame it has to be faked using: >| >| while True: # force the first iteration to always run >| process >| if condition: break >| >| Ugly and misleading. > > I disagree. Nothing is being faked. The generic loop is > > while True: > pre_process > if condition: break > post_process > > If there is no pre_process, abbreviate the first two lines as 'while > condition:'. If there is no post_process, some would like another > abbreviation. Understanable. But the use cases seem relatively few. And > anyway, a competant programmer must understand the generic loop and a > fraction form, which I believe is at least as common as the no post_process > case.
And this generic loop is faked. There is no notion in the language that somehow connects this if statement to be a breaking condition for a loop. If it would be a real syntatic construct in the language, it would probably look more like: do: pre_process until condition: post_process Personnaly I would have preferred to have this one generic loop construct with no abbreviations instead of having the while abbreviation that is to be combined with a break statement to fake the generic loop. -- Antoon Pardon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
