this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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The infamous "if loop" actually exists (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your point about it not running when there is nothing to iterate over is incorrect. The else-statement runs when the iterator is exhausted; if the iterator empty, it is exhausted immediately and the else-statement is executed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think it's intended as "not only when" because it would make sense to have an "if empty" case but the way it is, it doesn't make sense

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

I think it does make sense, it's a "did this loop exit naturally? If so, do x". This makes a lot of sense if you, for example, have a loop that checks a condition and breaks if that condition is met, e.g. finding the next item in a list. This allows for the else statement to set some default value to indicate that no match was found.

Imo, the feature can be very useful under certain circumstances, but the syntax is very confusing, and thus it's almost never a good idea to actually use it in code, since it decreases readability a lot for people not intimately familiar with the language.

Edit: Now, this is just guessing, but what I assume happens under the hood is that the else statement is executed when the StopIteration exception is recieved, which happens when next() is called on an exhausted iterator (either empty or fully consumed)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Couldn't you just handle this with:


breakflag = False

for x in iterator:

     if breakcondition(x):
            breakflag = True
            break  
     dostuff()
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Thinking about it, it totally makes sense and has in inherent logic, even tho it's not intuitive