Maybe he meant "until" aka "do {...} while cond" -- this is a valuable and
missing mechanism. The argument back in the day was that having just one
looping construct was more friendly to tooling.On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 5:45 AM Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote: > On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 4:11 AM, Hugh Fisher <hugo.fis...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Another observation from this novice Go programmer: I'm puzzled why > > there's no while statement. > > > > I know it's possible to use a for, but it doesn't feel right to me. I > always > > think of for loops as for iterating over data structures. Originally just > > arrays, but languages like Python and Objective-C have extended for > > loops to other collections as well. "Looping until some condition is met" > > for me is a different control structure and needs a different keyword. > > > > There'd be overlap with the for statement, but if-then-else and switch > > with boolean case overlap too. > > > > And since while has been a reserved keyword in a lot of programming > > languages for many decades, I would bet a reasonable amount of > > money that a while statement could be added to Go right now and not > > break anyone's production code. > > A `while` statement would presumably be exactly identical to a `for` > statement with a single condition. So adding a `while` statement > would not add any power to the language, and would add an additional > keyword. All language choices are a cost benefit decision. In this > case the benefit is a looping construct that some people will find > clearer to read and write, and the cost is a new keyword that > everybody needs to learn, and that at this point in the language's > evolution will likely break some, even if not much, existing code. I > don't think the benefit is worth the cost. > > Ian > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "golang-nuts" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Michael T. Jones michael.jo...@gmail.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
