Loop-and-a-half (Re: Curious assignment behaviour)

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Paul Rubin <phr-n2001d at nightsong.com>:
...
| I think it's a mistake to expose too much abstract machinery in
| Python, which is supposed to be a practical language.  Like you, I
| don't see a need for a lot of "eyebrows" in loops, but I feel Python
| suffers by ignoring the tried and true.  
|
| Just today I had a bug that went something like:
|
|     n = compute_number_of_items()
|     for i in range(n):
|        try: process_an_item(items[i])
|        except: break
|     update_database('number of items processed = ' % i)
|
| The corresponding C code would have been similar except instead
| of "for i in range(n)" it would have said "for (i=0; i<n; i++)".
|
| I tested the Python code on some sample data and it worked fine, so I
| checked it in.  Then a while later it hit some real data where the
| number of items was 0.  The C-style for loop would have initialized i
| to 0 and then executed the loop zero times, clearly the right thing.
| The Python for loop does this cutesy-poo set-theoretic thing instead
| (even uselessly allocating a potentially huge block of memory unless
| you use xrange instead of range), so that if the range is empty, i
| never gets initialized and the update_database call throws an
| uninitialized variable exception.  Anyway it wasn't a big deal
| but I think Python would be improved by having a more traditional
| loop construct.

I am not a big fan of the for i in range() idiom, myself.  But you
aren't required to use it.  If you want the effect of 

   for (i = 0; i<n; i++) {
       --- do stuff --
   }

then in Python, you write

   i = 0
   while i < n:
       --- do stuff --
       i = i + 1

"wc" says that's 7 more characters to type, which would be a concern
if you have to engrave it on linoleum or something.  And you have to
avoid "continue".  It seems to me this is the loop construct that people
must use, though, if they're going to expect the tricks they learn
in C to work.  Python's "for" loop is really a different thing, not
something I ever found all that cutesy-poo, just a sequence thing
that you see in plenty of languages but not C.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com