‘Whilst’ keyword in PowerShell
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
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 } } |
No. 1 — August 25th, 2014 at 12:35 am
J has both a ‘while’ and also a ‘whilst’ keyword! No joke. Well, maybe it is. But still, this is indeed part of that language.