Raymond Hettinger has a good section on this, tracing it back Knuth's discourse on structured programming in the face of 'goto'. He suggests calling the keyword 'nobreak', rather than 'else'.
Inside any loop are a conditional and a jump. In pseudocode:
if not <loop end condition> then
<do loop things>
<jump to top of loop>
else //loop is done
<do things in the case that the loop has terminated naturally>
If we 'break' in the body of the loop for some reason, we will never hit the 'else' in this chunk of code. As Mr. Hettinger explains, this is obvious to anyone reading Knuth or coming from a 'goto' style of control flow. This is not an insult, but an observation. (Un)Fortunately, structured programming is the absolute norm now, and we learn looping constructs directly, rather than learning 'goto' and then building to looping constructs. Especially in a language with rich iteration protocols, such as Python, it is very much unapparent that the looping constructs are fancy wrappers around 'goto'.
Inside any loop are a conditional and a jump. In pseudocode:
If we 'break' in the body of the loop for some reason, we will never hit the 'else' in this chunk of code. As Mr. Hettinger explains, this is obvious to anyone reading Knuth or coming from a 'goto' style of control flow. This is not an insult, but an observation. (Un)Fortunately, structured programming is the absolute norm now, and we learn looping constructs directly, rather than learning 'goto' and then building to looping constructs. Especially in a language with rich iteration protocols, such as Python, it is very much unapparent that the looping constructs are fancy wrappers around 'goto'.Link to the talk: https://youtu.be/OSGv2VnC0go?t=948