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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

why "while 1:" and not "while true:"?

Because "while 1:" is valid Python, but "while true:" is not ;) (gotta capitalize "True").

In addition to the GP's self deprecating sibling comment, I started using Python around 2.2, before there were even "True" and "False". So, seeing a 'while 1' loop is perfectly natural to me. But, I'm also perfectly comfortable with Python's "truthiness" in more places than most people are.

As a bonus: consider "while 'false' :" as a perfectly valid start to an unbounded loop.

> consider "while 'false' :" as a perfectly valid start to an unbounded loop

That sort of thing is ubiquitous in dynamically-typed languages. Even HTML: the state of boolean attributes is determined by the attribute being set, regardless of its value, so <input disabled=false> will give you a nice disabled text box. Mind you, some attributes that you might think would be boolean actually aren’t, for varying reasons good and bad, e.g. autocomplete=on|off, aria-hidden=true|false.

Enjoy YAML with Norway. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359376

Cheers for the history lesson - True and False really are relatively new in Python. I wonder how common that knowledge is.

http://python-history.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-history-of-bo...

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/

I learned Python around that time, when the docs said that `open()` is deprecated and to use `file()` as a constructor instead. Still unlearning that habit.

It used to be slightly faster in Python 2, because True could be reassigned, so its value had to be loaded and checked with every iteration.

I think that's brain damage from years of embedded C.

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