Labeled breaks in Python

I am a recent fan of Python, a very neat scripting language.

One thing I miss from Perl is the availability of labeled breaks. What are those? Suppose you have two nested loops. When a condition is met in the inner loop, you want to exit both loops. With Python there is not straightforward way of doing it. Imagine we are reading an array of data, line by line and column by column, and we want to exit when meeting the first zero value. With Perl:

LINELOOP: foreach my $i (0..$lines)
{
  COLLOOP: foreach my $j (0..$columns)
  {
     break LINELOOP unless $val[$i][$j];
  };
};

A simple “break” will exit the innermost loop, but we can use a label to exit a specific loop. However, in Python there is no such a thing as a labeled loop, as explained in this PEP.

My rant is with the explanations given by van Rossum himself in Python mailing list to reject the change:

1. The complexity added to the language, permanently.
2. My expectation that the feature will be abused more than it will be used right.

Wow! Incredible reasons!

The first one is silly: other languages have it, and it has worked fine. Adding complexity to a tool for the sake of it is really stupid, I agree. But the fact is labeled breaks would be tremendously useful, so the increase in complexity would be justified. Surely a language that can only print “Hello world” would be less complex, yet of little use.

The second reason is absolutely over-the-shoulder-of-the-users. So now good old Guido must guide his sheep along the “correct” path, lest we get lost! He is punishing the good programmers by not giving them a useful tool, so that bad programmers are protected from their stupidity. It’s like not selling cars at all because some people drive while drunk.

Just my 2 cents…