Re: Loops (was Re: do { quit; } else { })

On Sun, 20 Apr 2025 14:53:54 +0100
bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:

On 20/04/2025 12:00, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

 
Exactly 19 days ago I'd even have written such a proposal, and,
fitting to the calendar date, of course I'd have used a distinct
name for the feature; 'for_losers(var,expr,expr[,expr])'. 

 
This is quite telling in that:
 
(1) You regard the idea of desiring such a feature as a joke
 
(2) You consider those who'd like to use it as 'losers'
 
Just such a feature seems to be the primary style of 'for' in
languages such as Ada, Python, Modern Fortran, Odin, Ruby, Julia,
Rust, Matlab, Algol68, Euphoria, Ocaml, Logo, Nim, PL/I, Haxe, Lua,
....
>

In majority of languages in your list 'for' loops iterates through all
elements of collection. If collection happens to be a range
(terminology shared by python and Rust) then 'for'  behaves as a
counting loop. If it isn't then it does not. Even Matlab, despite its
fortranic roots, belongs to that group.
C++ achieve the same objectives [with typical C++ ugliness] by means
of std::foreach.
If I am not mistaken, all exception to that pattern are old languages.

>
Even Bash has it. All losers?
>

Not all, just many.

Interestingly, so does BCPL: you may be aware that C was influenced
by B, which itself was supposed to be influenced by BCPL. So what the
hell happened?
>

So, what happened?