while true: !!!

[Blair Lowe]

Hey!

Happy Holidays.

<and rave>
I wrote TWO articles in this thread, and you have written three, yet 
you ("Fredrik Lundh" ) bitch about me (at least there was a <rant> 
tag, thanks for that;) ) wasting bandwidth and flame me, just to try 
to get in your last word.

If you would like to kill a thread, then learn to send more friendly 
messages. Personally I don't care if there are 200 more messages on 
this issue. My email machine sorts this stuff with procmail (eudora 
pro has some good filtering too), so I can take it or leave it. I 
recommend that others sort their email as well to reduce thread 
stress.
</ and rave>.

Thanks to "Delaney, Timothy" for his gracefull reply, and apologise 
for grilling him so.

<and more rant and rave>
The fact is that I DO care about this issue, and that is why I read 
the mailing list, and I don't think that I should be delegated to the 
pep just because I put in my 2 cents. I would love to do that but I 
do not have 1 to 2 hours to get into the source forge stuff right 
now. I would like to do it, though, and I may yet. Why don't YOU do 
it?

or even better, fix my compilation problem with "compiling 
BeOpen-Python-2.0-1.src.rpm" and stop reading this thread.
</ and more rant and rave>

One thing that we have learned here is that like perl, there is more 
than one way of doing things ... and here is another "english" way of 
putting the statement.

Just because I think that what has become a standard from repeated 
use, and lack of rethinking does NOT mean that I am from another 
planet.

WHO says that while 1 is a "standard python idiom"? Certainly not in 
my company! Go ahead and use while 1: I will know what you mean, and 
therefor this is perhaps a useless discussion as you say, but 
READABILITY is crucial in any computing project, and that is one of 
the reasons python was invented.


I do agree with your position that we "don't say it in English", so ...


Along the lines of:
At 07:16 +0000 2000/12/16, Greg Jorgensen wrote:
>I worked on a huge C/C++ mutant project a few years ago. One of the
>programmers thought this was clever:
>
>   // buried in some nested #include file
>   #define FOREVER true
>   ...
>   while (FOREVER) { ... }

etc.


finished = 0
...
while not finished:
    bla bla bla.


OK. I'll try not to contribute to this thread anymore (but no promises).

Blair.



At 10:05 +0000 2000/12/18, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>Blair Lowe wrote:
>
><rant>
>
>>  >The idiom is actually
>>  >
>>  >while 1:
>>  >
>>  > do something
>>  >     if condition:
>>  >        break
>>  >
>>  > do something else
>>  >
>>  >Basically, it's for dealing with situations where you can't tell at the
>>  >beginning or end of a loop if the loop is completed - only somewhere
>>  >in the middle. The canonical example is
>>
>
>  > This is exactly what a python program should be NOT doing.
>
>bullshit.
>
>the "while 1" loop IS the standard Python idiom.
>
>no matter what you think, that won't change.  get over it.
>
>>  "while 1" is one of the most cryptic statements in Computer
>  > Science.
>
>what planet do you live on?
>
>>  It is cheap to define true and false once, or (my favourite) define
>>  ever (;;). Although the definition is cryptic, the resulting code is
>>  very readable.
>
>really?  in what english language does
>
>     "while true"
>
>make any more sense than
>
>     "while 1"
>
>maybe you meant:
>
>     "while true is true"
>
>which, of course, is just plain silly.
>
>:::
>
>can we please kill this thread now?
>
>instead of repeating the same stupid opinions over and over
>again, do something useful.  there are lots of PEPs that could
>need your input:
>
>     http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/
>
>if you find something to complain about in there, post to this
>forum (but not to this thread, please).
>
>(and if you really think that "while 1" is the biggest problem on the
>planet right now, feel free to contribute a "how to write potentially
>endless loops" PEP.  just make sure to include all points of view...)
>
></rant>
>
></F>
>
>
>--
>http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

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