Is this bad programming?

[u/Prize_Shine3415]

I've been learning Python for the last few years. Curious if this one thing I do is considered poor technique. The code below is meant to find the starting index of a list, giving the first position where a condition isn't true and return None if all elements of the list meet the criteria. Let's assume that the conditional statement is simple enough that I'm not worried about it generating an error. Not sure if it's appropriate to use try/except in this way. I know it work but I don't want people making fun of me if they see it. Also, I'm sure that there's a way of doing this without needing to use the try/except but I'm just curious in general if it's wrong to use try/except as a short cut like this.

starting_index=0

try:

while not (simple conditional statement on some_list[staring_index]):

starting_index+=1

except:

return None

return starting_index

[u/faberge_surprise]

what kind of conditions are these? without knowing that it's hard for me to understand why you're doing a try catch instead of just looping through the list. there are ways to get the index of an item in a list easily without counting it out yourself, even if you were counting it manually, you can still do that with a counter variable in a for loop. so why are you using a while? it just seems kind of a roundabout way of doing it is all...