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Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by bogomipz on Friday July 13, 2018 @12:08AM (#17520460)
Can you explain what a "loop-and-a-half" is in Python?
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by blake_himself on Friday July 13, 2018 @12:37AM (#17520537)

    x = stuff
    while x:
        x = stuff
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by Delgan on Friday July 13, 2018 @03:36AM (#17521139)
On the contrary, loop-and-a-half is intended to avoid repeating stuff outside and inside of the loop body.

    while true:
        x = stuff
        if not x:
            break
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by chucksmash on Sunday July 15, 2018 @12:57AM (#17533866)
GPs example is perfectly valid as well - this is just a restatement of the same logic in a way that keeps the logic contained within the loop at the cost of using a conditional plus a break inside of an unconditional loop. See [0]:

  Another motivating code pattern is the "loop and a half".
 
  It was once common for processing a file by line, but that 
  has been solved by making file objects iterable; however 
  other non-iterable interfaces still suffer from patterns 
  like:
  
  line = f.readline()
  while line:
      ...  # process line
      line = f.readline()
  
  or like this:
  
  while True:
      line = f.readline()
      if not line:
          break
      ... # process line

  Either of those could be replaced with a much more clear
  and concise version using an assignment expression:

  while line := f.readline():
      ... # process line
[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/