On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 01:43 pm, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On 15 Oct 2017 02:10:15 GMT, r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) declaimed > the following: [...] >>def poly( n, length ): >> i = 0 >> while i < n: >> forward( length ) >> left( 360/n ) >> > > A clear example of why a pre-determined loop is better using "for" then > emulated with a non-deterministic "while". > > for i in range(n): > > avoids having to write separate initialization, test, and increment > statements.
This, a thousand times this. I'm reminded of an old joke: A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer and a computer programmer are discussing prime numbers and whether or not every odd number is prime. The mathematician says "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. So by induction, all odd numbers must be prime." The physicist says "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime... within 83% confidence limits, all odd numbers are prime." The engineer says "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, for safety we better treat 9 as prime, 11 is prime..." The computer programmer says "Listen you guys, you're all doing it wrong. I've written a program to check for primes, it says: 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime ..." -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
