for / while else doesn't make sense

[Dan Sommers]

On Mon, 06 Jun 2016 17:51:24 -0700, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

> It is nice to have a common, versatile looping form which can be
> arranged in different ways to suit the problem at hand. That’s why I
> like the C-style for-statement.

[example snipped]

I used to write a lot of assembly code, for a lot of different CPUs, and
they all had a common, versatile looping form which could be arranged in
different ways to suit the problem at hand.  On most chips, it was (and
still is) called JMP.  The trouble began with multiple conditional
branching, call stack maintenance, and those other higher level
abstractions that made my assembly code so hard to follow.  Why on Earth
would I use something so complicated as a DJNZ instruction when a
common, versatile sequence of decrement, test, and branch-on-not-zero
instructions was available?  And who needed a C-level for statment, let
alone local variables and a language-runtime-maintained function call
stack when I had a handful of common, versatile CPU registers?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html