2.4.4 The DO/END Instruction
DO [ repetitor ] [ conditional ] ;
[ clauses ]
END [ symbol ] ;
repetitor : = symbol = expri [ TO exprt ]
[ BY exprb ] [ FOR exprf ]
exprr
FOREVER
conditional : = WHILE exprw
UNTIL expru
The DO/END instruction is the instruction used for looping and
grouping several statements into one block. This is a multi-
clause instruction.
The most simple case is when there is no repetitor or conditional,
in which case it works like BEGIN/END in Pascal or {...} in C.
I.e. it groups zero or more REXX clauses into one conceptual
statement.
The repetitor subclause controls the control variable of the loop,
or the number of repetitions. The exprr subclause may specify a
certain number of repetitions, or you may use FOREVER to go on
looping forever.
If you specify the control variable symbol, it must be a variable
symbol, and it will get the initial value expri at the start of
the loop. At the start of each iteration, including the first, it
will be checked whether it has reached the value specified by
exprt. At the end of each iteration the value exprb is added to
the control variable. The loop will terminate after at most exprf
iterations. Note that all these expressions are evaluated only
once, before the loop is entered for the first iteration.
You may also specify UNTIL or WHILE, which take a boolean
expression. WHILE is checked before each iteration, immediately
after the maximum number of iteration has been performed. UNTIL is
checked after each iteration, immediately before the control
variable is incremented. It is not possible to specify both UNTIL
and WHILE in the same DO instruction.
The FOREVER keyword is only needed when there is no conditional,
and the repetitor would also be empty if FOREVER was not
specified. Actually, you could rewrite this as DO WHILE 1. The two
forms are equivalent, except for tracing output.
The subclauses TO, BY, and FOR may come in any order, and their
expressions are evaluated in the order in which they occur.
However, the initial assignment must always come first. Their
order may affect your program if these expressions have any side
effects. However, this is seldom a problem, since it is quite
intuitive. Note that the counting of iterations, if the FOR
subclause has been specified, is never affected by the setting of
NUMERIC DIGITS.
Example: Evaluation order
What may prove a real trap, is that although the value to which
the control variable is set is evaluated before any other
expressions in the repetitor, it is assigned to the control
variable after all expressions in the repetitor have been
evaluated.
The following code illustrates this problem:
ctrl = 1
do ctrl=f(2) by f(3) to f(5)
call func(6)
end
call func(7)
exit
f:
say ‘ctrl=’ctrl ‘arg=’arg(1)
return arg(1)
This code produces the following output:
ctrl=1 arg=2
ctrl=1 arg=3
ctrl=1 arg=5
ctrl=2 arg=6
ctrl=5 arg=6
ctrl=8 arg=7
Make sure you understand why the program produces this output.
Failure to understand this may give you a surprise later, when you
happen to write a complex DO-instruction, and do not get the
expected result.
If the TO expression is omitted, there is no checking for an upper
bound of the expression. If the BY subclause is omitted, then the
default increment of 1 is used. If the FOR subclause is omitted,
then there is no checking for a maximum number of iterations.
Example: Loop convergence For the reasons just explained, the
instruction:
do ctrl=1
nop /* and other statements */
end
will start with CTRL being 1, and then iterate through 2, 3, 4,
..., and never terminate except by LEAVE, RETURN, SIGNAL, or EXIT.
Although similar constructs in other languages typically provokes
an overflow at some point, something “strange” happens in REXX.
Whenever the value of ctrl becomes too large, the incrementation
of that variable produces a result that is identical to the old
value of ctrl. For NUMERIC DIGITS set to 9, this happens when ctrl
becomes 1.00000000E+9. When adding 1 to this number, the result is
still 1.00000000E+9. Thus, the loop “converges” at that value.
If the value of NUMERIC DIGITS is 1, then it will “converge” at
10, or 1E+1 which is the “correct” way of writing that number
under NUMERIC DIGITS 1. You can in general disregard loop
“convergence”, because it will only occur in very rare situations.
Example: Difference between UNTIL and WHILE
One frequent misunderstanding is that the WHILE and UNTIL
subclauses of the DO/END instruction are equivalent, except that
WHILE is checked before the first iteration, while UNTIL is first
checked before the second iteration.
This may be so in other languages, but in REXX. Because of the
order in which the parts of the loop are performed, there are
other differences. Consider the following code:
count = 1
do i=1 while count \= 5
count = count + 1
end
say i count
count = 1
do i=1 until count=5
count = count + 1
end
say i count
After the first loop, the numbers 6 and 5, while in the second
loop, the numbers 5 and 5 are written out. The reason is that a
WHILE clause is checked after the control variable of the loop has
been incremented, but an UNTIL expression is checked before the
incrementation.
A loop can be terminated in several ways. A RETURN or EXIT
instruction terminates all active loops in the procedure levels
terminated. Further, a SIGNAL instruction transferring control
(i.e. neither a SIGNAL ON nor SIGNAL OFF) terminates all loops at
the current procedural level. This applies even to “implicit”
SIGNAL instructions, i.e. when triggering a condition handler by
the method of SIGNAL. A LEAVE instruction terminates one or more
loops. Last but not least, a loop can terminate itself, when it
has reached its specified stop conditions.
Note that the SIGNAL instruction terminates also non-repetitive
loops (or rather: DO/END pairs), thus after an SIGNAL instruction,
you must not execute an END instruction without having executed
its corresponding DO first (and after the SIGNAL instruction).
However, as long as you stay away from the ENDs, it is all right
according to TRL to execute code within a loop without having
properly activated the loop itself.
Note that on exit from a loop, the value of the control variable
has been incremented once after the last iteration of the loop, if
the loop was terminated by the WHILE expression, by exceeding the
number of max iterations, or if the control variable exceeded the
stop value. However, the control variable has the value of the
last iteration if the loop was terminated by the UNTIL expression,
or by an instruction inside the loop (e.g. LEAVE, SIGNAL, etc.).
The following algorithm in REXX code shows the execution of a DO
instruction, assuming that expri, exprt, exprb, exprf, exprw,
expru, and symbol have been taken from the syntax diagram of DO.
@expri = expri
@exprt = exprt
@exprb = exprb
@exprf = exprf
@iters = 0
symbol = @expri
start_of_loop:
if symbol > @extrt then signal after_loop
if @iters > @exprf then signal after_loop
if exprw then signal after_loop
instructions
end_of_loop:
if \expru then signal after_loop
symbol = symbol + @exprb
signal start_of_loop
after_loop:
Some notes are in order for this algorithm. First, it uses the
SIGNAL instruction, which is defined to terminate all active
loops. This aspect of the SIGNAL instruction has been ignored for
the purpose of illustrating the DO, and consequently, the code
shown above is not suitable for nested loops. Further, the order
of the first four statements should be identical to the order in
the corresponding subclauses in the repetitor. The code has also
ignored that the WHILE and the UNTIL subclauses can not be used in
the same DO instruction. And in addition, all variables starting
with the at sign (@), are assumed to be internal variables,
private to this particular loop. Within instructions, a LEAVE
instruction is equivalent to signal after_loop, while a ITERATE
instruction is equivalent to signal end_of_loop.
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