On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 6:42 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Incidentally, I've often modified my loop counter, in C or REXX or any >> other language. About the only situation where I actually miss it in >> Python, though, is iterating over a list and mutating the list on the >> way through; and even that can often be done in other ways (maybe a >> list comp, filtering out some of the elements?). It's amazing how >> something can be so utterly fundamental (I mean, come ON! Who can >> imagine a language with no equivalent of the basic "do i=1 to 10" >> (REXX) or "for (int i=0;i<10;++i)" (C++) loop???) and yet so >> dispensable. > > I'm not sure "fundamental" is the right word. A for loop is just a > while loop with some syntactic sugar. For that matter, a while loop > is just a structured goto...
Of course, and function calls are just stack operations and gotos too. That's not what makes it fundamental - I'm talking at a source code level. Can you imagine a high level language without a simple notation for variable assignment? Certainly not. [1] Variable assignment, name binding, whatever you call it, is fundamental. Some kind of structured looping is also pretty critical; you don't see languages that force you to use bare goto everywhere and call themselves "high level". [2] Every high level language also needs some way to iterate over numbers. Most of them provide it as an intrinsic; Python happens to do it as a foreach over an easily-constructed iterable. ChrisA [1] DeScribe Macro Language would borderline-fail this test if I called it a HLL. It has "SET something TO somevalue". But DML is about on the level of Python's "dis.dis" output - assembly language for a byte-code interpreter. [2] DML passes this test, even. It has a block IF/ELSE/END IF statement, and a REPEAT/END REPEAT for looping, with the loop condition being provided by a statement "EXIT WHEN condition" that's like Python's "if condition: break". Mind you, it also provides language-level support for message boxes, including prompt boxes (ask the user to provide a string or integer), so it's a bit of an odd duck. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
