wordwhile

Wordwhile is a term used in discussions of programming and text processing to describe a word-oriented looping pattern that operates over the words of a document as long as a given condition holds. It is typically described informally rather than as a formal language construct, and it is more common in algorithm discussions, pseudocode, or introductory explanations than in production language syntax.

Definition and concept: A wordwhile loop involves iterating through a sequence of word tokens produced from an input text and evaluating a predicate on each word. The loop advances from one word to the next and continues while the predicate remains true; the loop stops when the predicate fails for the current word or when there are no more words. In practice, wordwhile is often implemented using a standard token stream with a conditional check, but described as a word-focused variant of the common while loop.

Typical usage: Wordwhile is used to express word-centric processing in documentation and teaching examples, such as filtering words by length, extracting words that match a pattern, or performing actions on a consecutive run of words that satisfy a criterion. It highlights the distinction between token-level iteration and character-level processing, and it can be helpful for communicating algorithmic intent without exposing low-level indexing details.

Relation and status: Wordwhile is not a formal feature of mainstream programming languages. It serves as a descriptive label for a word-based looping pattern and is often replaced by conventional while loops or token-based iterators in actual code. It remains a useful conceptual tool for discussing text processing and natural language processing workflows.

See also: While loop, tokenization, lexical analysis, text processing.