Assignment in a while?

[Alex Martelli]

none <""thulben\"@(none)"> wrote:
    ...
> can't do an assignment in the while loop.  I found a way around this 
> (see the commented out while loop), but it seems hackish.  Assignment
> within a while loop seems like a pretty standard thing, so I'm just 
> curious what I'm missing.

I see you've already received many excellent suggestions, and just
wanted to point out the way in which you CAN "assign-and-test" in those
rare occasions where you really want to (in my experience, that boils
down to: I need Python code whose structure is as close as possible to
some other's language -- either because I need to transliterate into
Python some published "reference implementation" kind of algorithm, or
because I know I'm just doing a _prototype_ in Python, and once that's
accepted some poor folks will have to transliterate it into C or
whatever).  Anyway, it boils down to something like...:

class ValueHolder(object):
    def __init__(self, value=None):
        self.set(value)
    def set(self, value): 
        self.value = value
        return value
data = ValueHolder()

and then, say, something like...:

while data.set(zip.zop()):
    frobnicate(data.value)

Not as Pythonic as iterators etc, but structurally very close to

while (xx=zip.zop()) {
    frobnicate(xx);
}

if that's what you need to stick close to!-)


Alex