Python Use while loop to escape complex if statements

It looks like you are trying to emulate the well-established pattern of "returning early" from a function, but without using a function. The only reason you use a while loop is so that you have something to break-early out of, and the loop only has one iteration. I would say just wrap your code in a function, and use early returns, as that is more idiomatic:

def should_perform_action(self) -> bool: if self.is_empty(): return False if self._index > self._count: return False return True # ... if self.should_perform_action(): # ...

Yes, break is generally intended to escape loops along with continue to skip the rest of a loop.. though if the loop is either logically only executed once and/or more generally if you find you have a lot of break statements and then do more work after a loop, consider packing it all into a function and returning early instead as @Paul M. notes

Otherwise for and while also offer else: for when they did not break, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it used by the latter

for index in range(10): if index < 3: continue if index > 5: break else: print("didn't break")

Official docs https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#while