An endless loop
bartc
bc at freeuk.com
Mon Oct 16 14:38:26 EDT 2017
On 16/10/2017 18:53, Stefan Ram wrote:
> Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> writes:
>> I honestly can't remember the last time I programmed an endless loop,
>> and I also can't remember the last time I used a while loop.
>> Those two things are probably related.
>
> My Python installation has a "Lib" directory.
>
> »^ +\bwhile\b.*:$« has 1348 hits in this directory,
> »^ +\bfor\b.*:$« has 8713. That's a ratio of 6.46.
>
> In other words, while-loops are only 13 % of all loops
> (while or for). That's a clear minority. But it does
> not indicate that while loops are used almost ever.
It's presumably a characteristic of the language. And it depends on what
the language offers, so if there was no 'while' at all, I guess it would
be 100% 'for'.
(I just looked through my non-Python language at a couple of projects
and got these figures:
forall 29% (Equivalent to Python 'for')
for 36% (Simple iteration)
while 14% (about the same as your figure)
repeat-until 3%
N-times 11%
endless loop 6%
11% N-times loops doesn't sound a lot but it's one in every 9 loops.
What the figures don't show is that the N-times and endless loops are
probably used more with short test programs than in final applications,
so having a very quick way to express them is convenient.)
--
bartc
More information about the Python-list
mailing list