If an interviewer asked me to find the last item in a linked list, I might write some code like this:

def get_last(node):
    while node is not None:
        node = node.next
    return node

But I'd find that my code doesn't do what I want it to, and my interviewer could probably whip up a formal proof of that shortly after I wrote the second line. This is because my loop condition is node is not None, so my "termination condition" (ie: the thing that will absolutely be true immediately after we exit the loop) is node is None.

I'm guaranteed to always return None!

This is (perhaps) a silly example. But the general technique of thinking about the termination condition I want when writing a loop condition is constantly useful to me.

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This is the shortest post I've ever written... I'm nervous about just ending it abrubtly. But I guess it can't be helped :(.

Bye for now!


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