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From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | Re: Why is there no `until' in elisp? |
Date: | Wed, 17 Oct 2018 15:33:03 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.2.1 |
On 10/17/18 2:49 PM, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
Le 17/10/2018 à 14h35, Paul Eggert a écrit :On 10/17/18 2:15 PM, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:“while” as used in natural language does *not* mean the same thing[…] And the same is true for "until".How’s that?
In English, "until Y do X" typically means "keep checking Y while you're doing X and stop the instant that Y becomes true". This means something different from the proposed (until Y X), for the same reason that the common meaning of "while Y do X" in English means something different from (while Y X).
I find “until” be a lot more used in all the languages I know, including english.
Although that might be true in other languages, it's certainly not true of English. Google, for example, reports about 8 billion hits for "while" but only 2 billion for "until". Admittedly Google hit counts are only vaguely approximate, but still....
The most obvious and only implementation of `unless', I ever seen *until now* is (while (not cond) body)
"unless" is something different from "until". Anyway, we're not making much progress here; feel free to have the last word.
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