Loops

[tedthebear]

I am a beginner at this. Can somebody give me a simple example of a loop in programming? I have been reading up on branch instructions and am somewhat confused. Thanks.

[mosquito]

The most used loops are a "for loop" and a "do while loop"

I'll give an example in Visual basic (because it's easy to understand)

Do while loop

A = 1
B = 5
Do While A < B
    print "A has a value of " & A
    A = A + 1
Loop

with this loop, A will be raised by 1 every time it loops until it is bigger than or equal to B. The output of this loop will be something like

A has a value of 1
A has a value of 2
A has a value of 3
A has a value of 4

Another popular loop system is the for loop

for A = 1 to 4 
    print "A has a value of " & A
next

This code will produce the exact same result.

The big advantage of the while loop is that you can compare anything to end your loop. You can use this loop to do something until a user strokes a key (read out the keystroke within the loop, and set a value to true and use the "while a <> true do")
The advantage of the for loop is that you don't have to increase the value yourself.

I hope this makes something clear. If you don't understand it, please post what part of the example you are having difficulties with.