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

Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> writes:

On 15/04/2025 13:34, Michael S wrote:
>
<snip>
>

I suspect that 'while' loop is here in C because Dennis Ritchie wanted
'do .. while() ' and thought that if the keyword is here anyway than
why not reuse it?
In the hindsight, probably a mistake.

>
In hindsight:
>
$ find . -name \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l
126343
$ find . -name \*.c | xargs grep -w while | wc -l
556
$ find . -name \*.c | xargs grep -w for | wc -l
1258
>
>
So although I use for() about twice as much as I use while(), I still
find while a better option one time in three.  That's useful enough to
make it worth keeping in the toolbox.

Out of curiousity, I tabulated a similar set of statistics for
a recent C project.  Considering just the three iteration
control structures (do/for/while), the results (rounded to the
nearest 0.1 percent) were

   while      56.1 %
   for        24.1 %
   do/while   19.5 %