Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computer programming, conditional loops or repetitive control structures are a way for computer programs to repeat one or more various steps depending on conditions set either by the programmer initially or real-time by the actual program. A conditional loop has the potential to become an infinite loop when nothing in the loop's body can ...
If-then-else flow diagram A nested if–then–else flow diagram. In computer science, conditionals (that is, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs) are programming language constructs that perform different computations or actions or return different values depending on the value of a Boolean expression, called a condition.
The else clause in the above example is linked to the for statement, and not the inner if statement. Both Python's for and while loops support such an else clause, which is executed only if early exit of the loop has not occurred. Some languages support breaking out of nested loops; in theory circles, these are called multi-level breaks.
The repeat statement repetitively executes a block of one or more statements through an until statement and continues repeating unless the condition is false. The main difference between the two is the while loop may execute zero times if the condition is initially false, the repeat-until loop always executes at least once.
C, PHP, Java: { <sequence> } Other programming languages have a different special terminator on each kind of compound statement, so that one or more statements are automatically treated as a group: Ada: if test then < sequence > end if; Many compound statements are loop commands or choice commands.
The loop counter is used to decide when the loop should terminate and for the program flow to continue to the next instruction after the loop. A common identifier naming convention is for the loop counter to use the variable names i , j , and k (and so on if needed), where i would be the most outer loop, j the next inner loop, etc.
An instruction step is a method of executing a computer program one step at a time to determine how it is functioning. This might be to determine if the correct program flow is being followed in the program during the execution or to see if variables are set to their correct values after a single step has completed.
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.