My example was only meant to be illustrative -- it does seem that there are times I really need to deal with the first-time (or subsequent-time) condition inside the loop, rather than outside, to avoid duplicating code (also, loops often iterate zero times, in which case you don't want the action to be taken).

I've tried a shorter version of #1, setting my $next_time = 1 and then testing for (!--$next_time) but that's sort of ridiculous.

In your second alternative, with the 'state' variable, does the state variable ever become zero again? The perldoc seems to say it is never reinitialized.

I didn't know about using 'each' with an array, as in your third alternative. That's neat.

Obviously there's not a brilliantly compact idiom :-)

In reply to Re^2: Easiest way to do something only on first iteration of loop by ibm1620
in thread Easiest way to do something only on first iteration of loop by ibm1620

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