Recently, SMBC Comics made the comment that, “In Britain, they have whilst loops, which do not terminate until the Queen says it's appropriate.”
If you are a programming language aficionado, you may recognize this keyword chiefly from languages of P-Celtic (especially Common Brythonic) origin.
One thing you may not know is that the PowerShell team has a huge Canadian contingent. There have been many Canadians responsible for PowerShell’s success, and early tab completion implementations automatically expanded “o” to “ou”. For example, Set-ConsoleColo<TAB>.
Those never made it into the product, but the official pronunciation of the about_* help topics continues to be (IPA əbʌʊt).
That said, how do you get the well-known ‘whilst’ keyword in PowerShell? With the new Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet in PowerShell version three, this is a breeze!
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function whilst
{ <# .SYNOPSIS Iterates over $scriptblock as long as the Queen says to. .EXAMPLE whilst "Changing the guard" { "Hello World" } #> param (## The status to check for $status, ## The action to invoke $scriptblock ) $r = iwr twitter.com/BritishMonarchy while( ($r.ParsedHtml.getElementById("timeline").getElementsByTagName("p") | Select -First 1).InnerText -match $status ) { & $scriptBlock Start-Sleep -Seconds (10 * 60) $r = iwr twitter.com/BritishMonarchy } } |