On 4/16/2017 11:35 AM, Michael Torrie wrote:
On 04/16/2017 07:57 AM, bartc wrote:
But people just don't want it.
/That/ is what surprises me, when people reject things that to me are
no-brainers.
Whereas to me, it is a no-brainer that we are better off *without*
multiple while/loop constructs.
I simply don't care about these missing loop constructs.
I do ;-) I consider the current simplicity a feature.
> Python works
great for what I use it for, and apparently works well for many people.
The great majority* of 'repetition with variation' is sequentially
processing items from a collection. Python does that nicely with 'for
item in collection: process(item)'. While-loops take care of everthing
else.
*I grepped 3.6.1 .../lib/*.py with the REs '^ *while ' and '^ *for ',
recursing into subdirectories, including tests and a few packages in
site-packages. These got 1389 and 9842 hits respectively. I am opposed
to adding syntax to subdivide the 12% of looping using 'while'. (As a
note, '^ *while True' had 363 hits, about 1/4 of while loops.)
> I have yet to find a loop that I couldn't construct with Python's
> apparently-limited constructs.
For-loops, 'limited' to iterating through collections (iterables), cover
at least 80% of cases. While-loops + continue/break easily cover the
remaining cases of linear repetition. Branching repetition, as in naive
Fibonacci calculation and tree processing, is more easily done with
recursion.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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