What I really mean, I think, is don’t get stuck in an infinite loop. That is repeating the same thing over and over again but not getting a result from your efforts. I think we all repeat some things in our lives and that usually makes good sense. It’s when our do loop becomes an infinite loop that we need to take a step back and reevaluate things.
A couple of definitions are in order:
- do until loop, (what I call a do loop), is a control flow statement that executes a block of code at least once, and then either repeatedly executes the block, or stops executing it, depending on a given boolean condition at the end of the block.
- An infinite loop error describes a technical glitch that forces your computer to repeat the same actions over and over again.
I’m not a computer programmer. Far from it. But along the way in my journey I have worked with programmers many times. While working on a benthic project in Northern Florida, ( A benthic study is the study of the organisms living on or near the bottom of a body of water. In this case an estuary). We collected a very large number of samples from multiple stations that needed to be identified and counted.
One of my fellow biologists in the environmental department was also a computer programmer. He wrote and executed all our programming needs and of course he wrote the programming for this new benthic study. When we ran the data that had been collected in the lab an interesting thing happened. The outcome wasn’t as expected. The program apparently was stuck at some point. Neil laughed and said, “oh.” “Hang on just a minute. It’s stuck in a do loop.” He added the necessary condition to exit the loop and the data made sense.
Again, I need to point out that I’m not a computer programmer and this is something that happened many, many years ago. But I think the lesson very much applies to our everyday lives. I know that sometimes I get stuck doing the same thing over and over again, maybe with slight variations, but not getting anywhere. I’m stuck in the human equivalent of a do loop that’s turned into an infinite loop .
Mostly, I think, it’s not good to be stuck. It’s better to figure out a solution or resolution to the situation at hand and move on.
