having problems with a multi-conditional while statement

[bowman.joseph at gmail.com]

Thanks for the assistance. I actually realized I was making things
more complicated than they needed to be and I really only needed one
condition to be met.

On Jan 6, 7:42 pm, Ned Deily <n... at acm.org> wrote:
> In article
> <40a44d6b-c638-464d-b166-ef66496a0... at l16g2000yqo.googlegroups.com>,
>
>
>
>  "bowman.jos... at gmail.com" <bowman.jos... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> > I'm trying to write a multi-conditional while statement, and am having
> > problems. I've broken it down to this simple demo.
>
> > #!/usr/bin/python2.5
>
> > condition1 = False
> > condition2 = False
>
> > while not condition1 and not condition2:
> >     print 'conditions met'
> >     if condition1:
> >         condition2 = True
> >     condition1 = True
>
> > As I understand it, this should print 'conditions met' twice, however,
> > it only prints it once. It seems that once condition1 is made true,
> > the whole thing evaluates as true and stops the while loop.
>
> Are you perhaps expecting that the "while" condition is tested at the
> end of the loop?   It's not; it is tested at the top of the loop, so,
> once the condition evaluates as false, the loop exits.  This can even
> result in zero trips:
>
> >>> while False:
>
> ...     print "never"
> ...
>
>
>
> Unwinding the snippet above:
>
> >>> condition1 = False
> >>> condition2 = False
> >>> not condition1 and not condition2
> True
> >>> if condition1:
>
> ...     condition2 = True
> ...>>> condition1 = True
> >>> not condition1 and not condition2
>
> False
>
> # -> while loop exits after 1 trip
>
> --
>  Ned Deily,
>  n... at acm.org