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https://bro-tracker.atlassian.net/browse/BIT-1315?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=19606#comment-19606
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Jon Siwek commented on BIT-1315:
--------------------------------
Distributing work over time via a recurring event isn't the same thing, though.
I don't mind if this gets postponed or even just rejected. I mostly made the
patch for my own interest (didn't take long) and just to see the reaction --
I'm not actually sure I've seen any arguments that make me think it's
completely a bad idea. What I don't like is that it feels as if this aspect of
the language comes from the assumption that the programmer doesn't know what
they're doing. And that doesn't make it fun when it comes time to work around
it and or try to explain the absence to someone.
To summarize my reasoning: I think there are cases where something like a
"while loop" is an efficient way to get things done and I would at least like
to be able to decide for myself whether it's reasonable or too dangerous to use
for a particular task.
For a specific example I ran in to when making the API in to Broker's data
stores:
https://github.com/bro/bro/blob/topic/jsiwek/broker/testing/btest/comm/data.bro
For that I guess I'm in a position where I can modify Bro's core to make "for"
loops aware of the new opaque type, but special-casing doesn't feel great --
essentially what I've made is Bro bindings for the Broker library and the least
stuff I have to modify in the core language the better because it sort of
proves the possibility of making Bro bindings for other libraries as isolated
plugins.
> Teach Bro how to 'while'
> ------------------------
>
> Key: BIT-1315
> URL: https://bro-tracker.atlassian.net/browse/BIT-1315
> Project: Bro Issue Tracker
> Issue Type: New Feature
> Components: Bro
> Reporter: Jon Siwek
> Priority: Low
> Fix For: 2.4
>
>
> topic/jsiwek/while has an implementation of a general purpose 'while' loop.
> If one wants to hack around the current limitation of only looping over
> collections, they're going to do it (e.g. recursion), so why not just provide
> a more convenient way instead? The mess you have to write to work around the
> limitation may be more error-prone than just providing a simple while loop.
> An alternative to adding 'while' to the language might be to allow "for ()"
> to be an unbounded loop and force the author to put the necessary
> break/return conditions in the body.
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