Loop-and-a-half (Re: Curious assignment behaviour)

[Huaiyu Zhu]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2001 23:33:20 +0200, Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:
[...]
>
>for line in file.xreadlines():
>    if line == 'end': break
>    etcetc(line)
[...]
>
>while data.set(file.readline()) != 'end':
>    process(data.get())
>

Alex, what's your opinion comparing these to the following?

while line = file.xreadlines(); line != 'end':
    etcetc(line)


I'm pushing for this because it is not just syntactic suguar.  It gives
semantic advantage as well.  For example,

while x = next(); not x.is_end:
    y = process(x)
    if y.is_what_we_are_looking_for(): break
else:
    raise "not found"

It is not equivalent to this naive version:

while 1:
    x = next()
    if x.is_end: break
    y = process(x)
    if y.is_what_we_are_looking_for(): break
else:
    raise "not found"


That's because there are two breaks that have different semantical meanings.
The fully equivalent version in today's syntax has to use one extra variable
(assuming the variable _flag is not used for other purpose):

_flag = 0
while 1:
    x = next()
    if x.is_end: break
    y = process(x)
    if y.is_what_we_are_looking_for(): 
        _flag = 1
        break
if not _flag:
    raise "not found"
del _flag

This is a lot of verbage that does not say directly what we intend to do.


Huaiyu