All the languages we teach have if and else conditionals, and while loops. They're a necessary part of any language, accepted as something of a standard, and we teach them on all the fundamental courses.
Uniquely, Python allows you to add an else clause onto the end of a while loop. Why? So that you can define a block of code that's to be run upon an exit from the loop caused by the loop's condition becoming false, but that's to be skipped over if the loop exits through a break statement or because of an exception.
Here's an example. This program is going to loop, reading in people who are coming to your teenager's party. If you complete the data entry by pressing the "enter" key without entering another name, the <b>else</b> clause on the while is run and your party list is displayed. If you enter "parents" then the party plans are abandoned - you break out of the data entry loop and don't run the else block.
running = 1
friends = []
while running:
said = raw_input("Who's coming to the party? ")
if said == "parents":
print "Party plans abandoned"
break
if said == "":
print "Data entry complete"
running = 0
else:
friends.append(said)
else:
print "Having a party for ",
print friends
print "program exiting"
Let's see what that does when we run it
earth-wind-and-fire:~/feb05 grahamellis$ python pywhi
Who's coming to the party? Tom
Who's coming to the party? Dick
Who's coming to the party? Harry
Who's coming to the party?
Data entry complete
Having a party for ['Tom', 'Dick', 'Harry']
program exiting
earth-wind-and-fire:~/feb05 grahamellis$ python pywhi
Who's coming to the party? Lisa
Who's coming to the party? Leah
Who's coming to the party? parents
Party plans abandoned
program exiting
earth-wind-and-fire:~/feb05 grahamellis$
See also
Python Programming course
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