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An endless loop

bartc bc at freeuk.com
Mon Oct 16 14:38:26 EDT 2017 
On 16/10/2017 18:53, Stefan Ram wrote:
> Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> writes:
>> I honestly can't remember the last time I programmed an endless loop,
>> and I also can't remember the last time I used a while loop.
>> Those two things are probably related.
> 
>    My Python installation has a "Lib" directory.
> 
>    »^ +\bwhile\b.*:$« has 1348 hits in this directory,
>    »^ +\bfor\b.*:$« has 8713. That's a ratio of 6.46.
> 
>    In other words, while-loops are only 13 % of all loops
>    (while or for). That's a clear minority. But it does
>    not indicate that while loops are used almost ever.

It's presumably a characteristic of the language. And it depends on what 
the language offers, so if there was no 'while' at all, I guess it would 
be 100% 'for'.

(I just looked through my non-Python language at a couple of projects 
and got these figures:

   forall       29%    (Equivalent to Python 'for')
   for          36%    (Simple iteration)
   while        14%    (about the same as your figure)
   repeat-until  3%
   N-times      11%
   endless loop  6%

11% N-times loops doesn't sound a lot but it's one in every 9 loops. 
What the figures don't show is that the N-times and endless loops are 
probably used more with short test programs than in final applications, 
so having a very quick way to express them is convenient.)


-- 
bartc
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