Proposal: support for loops and control flow operators with cell magics

[jaanli]

Problem

I am building educational materials for my data thinking lectures, such as:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/onefact/datathinking.org-codespace/blob/main/notebooks/princeton-university/week-1-visualizing-33-million-phone-calls-in-new-york-city.ipynb

https://colab.research.google.com/github/jaanli/language-model-notebooks/blob/main/notebooks/getting-started.ipynb

https://colab.research.google.com/github/onefact/electronic-health-records/blob/main/notebooks/loading_physionet_mimic_data.ipynb

In the last example, there is a lot of repetitive copy and pasting (about 40 copy and pastes needed to rerun the parent prompt on each of the files in the current working directory).

Proposed Solution

There should be a way to accept additional input such as --format or create cells automatically: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13614783/programmatically-add-cells-to-an-ipython-notebook-for-report-generation (though this seems complicated).

Additional context

Guidance (https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance) comes to mind and SGLang (https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang) and aici (https://github.com/microsoft/aici).

Open to any suggestions on ways to reduce the overhead! This library is already making complex analytics pipelines accessible to my students, so I'm very grateful 🙏