[Bro-Dev] [JIRA] (BIT-1315) Teach Bro how to 'while'

[Vern Paxson (JIRA)]

    [ https://bro-tracker.atlassian.net/browse/BIT-1315?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=19608#comment-19608 ] 

Vern Paxson commented on BIT-1315:
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I'm okay with this addition, too.  If we want to think about more elegant forms for down the road, I'd suggest studying the use of "generators" in the (now-long-out-of-use) "Icon" programming language.  These enable expressing all sorts of iterative computation in concise-but-readable ways.

> 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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