[Tutor] Losing the expressiveness of C's for-statement?

[Stephen McInerney]

Hi all,

As the Python doc says: "The for statement in Python differs a bit from what 
you may be used to in C or Pascal. Rather than giving the user the ability 
to define both the iteration step and halting condition (as C), Python's for 
statement iterates over the items of any sequence (a list or a string)."

This is much poorer than C/C++, and does not allow for the step action to be 
multiple actions, fn calls etc. - not straightforwardly anyway. (don't take 
that as a challenge)
- I know how to migrate to a while-loop, but I lament losing the very 
compact expressiveness of:
for (node=start; value<threshold && node!=end; node=node->next) { ... }
- I figure the straightforward answer will be "use a while-loop, put the 
iteration step at the end".
- the fancy showoff answer will probably involve a funky iterator with 
side-effects, or returning tuples.
- what if the loop iteration step involves variables from within the 
loop-body (e.g. as in quicksort stepsize);
- what I'm trying to drive at here is the general solution of least 
idiomaticity, not of greatest language-specific cleverness

Any comments or article links? Also, it would be useful to improve the 
Python tutorial on this.
Since this is one area where Python is (syntactically) inferior to 
C/C++/Java.

Thanks,
Stephen

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