Python and Flaming Thunder

[MRAB]

On May 20, 4:20 am, Dave Parker <davepar... at flamingthunder.com> wrote:
> > > I <davepar... at flamingthunder.com> wrote:
> > > Plus, me getting paid to work on Flaming Thunder is far more
> > > motivating than me not getting paid to work on Python.
> > On May 14, 8:30 pm, John Salerno <johnj... at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
> > That's truly disappointing.
>
> I guess I could have stated that better.  Flaming Thunder is a labor
> of love for me.  I've programmed in almost every language since
> FORTRAN and Lisp, and Flaming Thunder is the language I've always
> wished the others were.
>
> For one example, I've always preferred compiled languages because
> they're faster.  So Flaming Thunder is compiled.
>
> For another example, I've always preferred languages that are English-
> like because it's easier to return to your code after several years
> and still know what you were doing (and it's easier for someone else
> to maintain your code).
>
> For over 5 years I've been working on Flaming Thunder unpaid and on my
> own, getting the back-end up and running.  8-by-8 shotgun cross
> compilers written in assembly language, that can fit all of the
> libraries for both the 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD, Linux, Mac
> OS X and Windows into a single executable file that's less than 180K,
> aren't written overnight.
>
> So now that I've released it, it's extremely gratifying that people
> think it's cool enough to actually pay $19 for it.  That gives me lots
> of motivation (and buys enough time) for me to add features to it as
> fast as possible.
>
> To whit: you pointed out the awkwardness in Python of having to
> declare a for-loop variable when you only wanted to loop a specific
> number of times and didn't need the variable.  Last week, Flaming
> Thunder had the same awkwardness.  If you wanted to loop 8 times:
>
> for i from 1 to 8 do <statement>
>
> you still had to use a variable (in this case, i).  This week, I've
> added two new for-loop variations that fix that awkwardness, and also
> allow you to explicitly declare an infinite loop without having to
> rely on idiomatic constructs such as while-true.  Examples of the two
> new variations (for-forever and for-expression-times):
>
> Write "Fa".
> For 8 times do write "-la".
>
Personally (and borrowing from Python), I'd prefer something more
like:

Write "Fa".
Repeat 8 times:
    Write "-la".

> For forever do
>   (
>   Write "Do you know the definition of insanity? ".
>   Read response.
>   ).

Repeat:
    Write "Do you know the definition of insanity? ".
    Read response.