On Jun 17, 2005, at 6:40 AM, Robert Klemme wrote:
> Even more so: what's the point of a loop that is alway run only once?

Er, the loop doesn't run once, only the initialization code. The loop  
runs forever.


On Jun 17, 2005, at 6:11 AM, Devin Mullins wrote:
> And wouldn't it be faster still just to pull foo = bar out of the  
> while loop? :)

I actually flubbed the example slightly. It should have been:

   already_run = false
   while true
     do_something( )
     foo = bar if !already_run
     already_run = true
   end

Where "do_something()" was actually about 15 lines of code. The  
alternative would have been:

   do_something( )
   foo = bar
   while true
     do_something( )
   end

which is not very DRY when do_something( ) is a large block of code.

But again, even the programmer himself called it a hack while writing  
it; at the time we weren't even sure if setting foo=bar after the  
first iteration was the right fix to the problem.