The rap against "while True:" loops
greg
greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Oct 12 04:42:23 EDT 2009
kj wrote:
> I'm coaching a group of biologists on basic Python scripting. One
> of my charges mentioned that he had come across the advice never
> to use loops beginning with "while True".
It's possible this is something he was told in relation to
another language that has more options.
For example, in C there's for(;;) as an alternative, although
there's not much to choose between them. Also you can often
use an assignment-as-condition trick to squeeze a loop-and-
a-half into a while(), and you have do-while loops for
testing at the end.
Python is much more limited -- anything which isn't a
for has to be a while of some shape, so it's harder to
avoid while True without introducing extra complexities
into the code.
--
Greg
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