IF lactose is present in the extracellular environment && IF glucose is NOT present in the extracellular environment: Activate the lac operon and transcribe th

IF lactose is present in the extracellular environment && IF glucose is NOT present in the extracellular environment: Activate the lac operon and transcribe the genes for lactose uptake and metabolism, entering a while loop: WHILE lactose is present: Keep transcribing those genes. However, this is not the DNA acting alone, it's just a component in the cellular system. The cell (E. coli in this case) is always generating a minimal amount of lactose and other sugar transporters, which act as sensors in the cell membrane that trigger feedback loops (otherwise, how would the cell ever know lactose was present?). If glucose is present, E. coli uses it preferentially and downregulates other sugar uptake and metabolism genes. This is all fairly analog rather than digital, i.e. genes that are 'turned off' may still be transcribed at a very low level. DNA is probably more comparable to RAM, and the CPU perhaps comparable to the transcriptome (DNA -> mRNA) and the ribosome (mRNA -> protein), and overall the cell is running something comparable to a parallel multi-process fetch-decode-execute cycle.