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In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.
In most computer programming languages, a while loop is a control flow statement that allows code to be executed repeatedly based on a given Boolean condition. The while loop can be thought of as a repeating if statement .
In computer programming, a loop counter is a control variable that controls the iterations of a loop (a computer programming language construct). It is so named because most uses of this construct result in the variable taking on a range of integer values in some orderly sequences (for example., starting at 0 and ending at 10 in increments of 1)
In this example, the constraints on control flow are illustrated. Code block 1 shows the correct ordering when using an if statement in the C programming language. Code block 2 illustrates a problem where a statement that is supposed to be controlled by the if statement is no longer controlled by it.
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
The example below (CT4) shows how extending the earlier table, to include a 'next' entry (and/or including an 'alter flow' subroutine) can create a loop (This example is actually not the most efficient way to construct such a control table but, by demonstrating a gradual 'evolution' from the first examples above, shows how additional columns ...
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Some languages may use a different naming convention for this type of loop. For example, the Pascal and Lua languages have a "repeat until" loop, which continues to run until the control expression is true and then terminates. In contrast a "while" loop runs while the control expression is true and terminates once the expression becomes false.