Help with Iteration

[Aaron Brady]

On Oct 19, 12:27 pm, "Eric Wertman" <ewert... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Aaron Brady <cast...pigmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> while 1:
> >>>    calculate_stuff( )
> >>>    if stuff < 0.00005:
> >>>        break
>
> >> The thought police will come and get you.
>
> Based on Aaron's previous posting history,  I suspect this was a joke.

Not necessarily, (technically...) if you mean that those 4 lines would
never be consistent with my other stuff, see below.  I didn't intend
to mock the OP at all.  But you're right, it definitely looked
oversimplified.

'calculate_stuff' could have been defined local to the function:

def f():
  stuff= [1]
  def calculate_stuff( ):
    stuff.append( stuff[-1]* 2 )
  calculate_stuff( )

Then the test 'if some_comparison( stuff )' still makes sense and
doesn't require a global variable.

For the 'stuff < 0.00005' test in particular to make sense, 'stuff'
could be an instance of an object with '__lt__' defined.

Since Python doesn't define an 'until' statement in addition to
'while', the question could have been about control flow.