PEP on breaking outer loops with StopIteration

[nwinters3000 at gmail.com]

On Jun 9, 10:50 pm, Dan Bishop <danb... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 8:07 pm, "Kris Kowal" <kris.ko... at cixar.com> wrote:
>
> > I had a thought that might be pepworthy.  Might we be able to break
> > outer loops using an iter-instance specific StopIteration type?
>
>
> You can break out of outer loops now with the proper (ab)use of
> exceptions:
>
> class BreakInner(Exception):
>     pass
> class BreakOuter(Exception):
>     pass
> try:
>     for letter in string.lowercase:
>         try:
>             for number in xrange(10):
>                 print letter, number
>                 if letter == 'a' and number == 5:
>                     raise BreakInner()
>                 if letter == 'b' and number == 5:
>                     raise BreakOuter()
>         except BreakInner:
>             pass
> except BreakOuter:
>     pass

I prefer having a new function wrapping the inner loop and using both
break and return, but this doesn't allow you to "break 1 loop up and 2
loops up", and doesn't help to continue a particular loop further up

def innerLoop(letter):
   for number in xrange(10):
      print letter, number
      if letter == 'a' and number == 5:
         break
      if letter == 'b' and number == 5:
         return

for letter in string.lowercase:
   innerLoop(letter)


In response to the suggested syntax, I have found occasions where I
iterate through the same variable [say searching for duplicates within
some tolerance to merge into one item] in an inner loop.  I also don't
see how it would extend to something like:

for evenNumber in [x*2+1 for x in xrange(5)]: print evenNumber