Understanding Loop concepts
In programming, some statements are required to be executed several number
of times. Suppose programmer has to execute some statements (like print
statement) huge number of the times , but writing the statement huge number
of times is a way more time consuming and considerably increases the lines
of code. To make this handy,
loop comes into play.
Loop is one of the most powerful and basic building blocks of computer
programming. Loop let you write code which needs to be repeated several
times in a very efficient way. Just write the code once with some loop
conditions and run the code any given number of times.
Loop consists of body and iterating conditions:
Loop body holds the code which needs to execute many times, Iterating conditions allows you to write start, stop and iteration
conditions for the code.
Here is the general syntax for the loop:
Loop(start; stop; iteration) {
// statements
// statements
}
How loop works
First starts with the
start value followed by
checking stop condition, if the
condition holds true then
enters to the loop body and start
executing statements inside
body and after executing the last statement inside loop body , again the
executing pointer moves to the top of the loop statement and perform the
iteration condition followed by
checking the stop condition and if the condition holds true same
steps will be performed until the
stop condition becomes false and after getting the false stop condition,
the executing pointer moves to
the next statement after loop statement.
Example explaining the working of the loop using for loop:
for( start=0; start<5; start++ ) {
printf(“loop concepts”); // prints the string five times
}
Steps:
- start=0 and check if start < 5; true
- enter inside the loop body and execute print statement
- move to the top of for loop statement and increment the start by 1 and check if start <
5; true.
Repeat the 2nd and 3rd steps until start <
5 becomes false, after that jump out of the loop.
Output:
loop concepts
loop concepts
loop concepts
loop concepts
loop concepts
