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.

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!

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
    }
}