Infinite while loops

We have learned that we can use while loops in order to repeat a block of code until an exit condition is reached. However, what will happen if we set our loop condition simply as True? This will make your code run the body statements indefinitely, since running the body statements does not change the value of the condition, and such a loop is called an infinite loop. The general form is as follows.

while True:
    <Statements>

<Statements> will be executed repeatedly until the users manually terminates the program or your program crashes. For instance, the following is a while loop that takes in your name as input and prints it out indefinitely.

Here’s a possible output:

Please enter your name: Gerald
You entered Gerald
Please enter your name: Sorin
You entered Sorin
Please enter your name: Yeohee
You entered Yeohee
Please enter your name: Annie
You entered Annie
Please enter your name: Winny
You entered Winny
Please enter your name: ^C
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/main.py", line 2, in <module>
    name = input('Please enter your name: ')
KeyboardInterrupt

As the condition is set as True and it never turns into False, the while loop asks you to enter your name and shows it indefinitely until you hit control + C (which creates the ^C characters) to manually exit the program. Note that you cannot see the last line of the code print('Program ended') executed, because the while loop never ends.

Finally, note that the runner will eventually terminate every computation after a few seconds. On your own computer, you won’t be so lucky! Remember you can always hit control + C to “interrupt” a program. Depending on your operating system, the Task Manger or the kill command can come in handy when programs don’t respond to interrupts.