newbie question

[Peter Hansen]

Dan Perl wrote:
> I can't say that is not part of the reason, but the example in the OP is a 
> clear illustration of cases where something like an increment/decrement 
> operator would be very useful.  

The OP didn't show how he was using the "while (n--)" at all,
so it can hardly be a clear illustration of how it's useful.
In fact, it's even possible it was entirely unnecessary in
the original code...  at this point I'd be really interested
in seeing just what code is inside the "while" statement, and
possibly what follows it (if the following code relies on the
value of "n").

> OTOH, I was thinking of saying in my 
> previous posting that I prefer
>     for n in range(start, 0, -1):
> to
>     n = start
>     while (n--)
> I think that the first form is more readable, although that may be just me. 
> I would actually even prefer the 'for' statement in C to the 'while' 
> statement:
>     for (n=start; n<=0; n--) 

I'm not sure if it's just picking nits, but I'd like to
point out that neither of your alternatives is actually
equivalent to the while (n--) form...  nor was Jeff
Shannon's attempt (in that case it leaves the loop with
n equal to 0, not -1).

The fact that it's so easy to get confused with post-decrement
is perhaps an excellent reason to keep it out of Python.

-Peter