While loops

[nilamo]

If you really wanted to use a while loop, you could just check against the list itself (an empty list is the same as False), and .pop() instead of re-building the list each iteration.  So...

items = [2, 4, 6, 8]
total = 0
while items:
   total += items.pop()
print(total)

Or, if you're a map/reduce/functional fan (and don't want to just use sum() for some reason), then there's yet another way:

from functools import reduce
import operator

items = [2, 4, 6, 8]
print(reduce(operator.add, items))