💾What is a Loop?

While and For, among other things.

Say, we want to print "Hello!" 3 times. One might consider doing it like this:

print("Hello!")
print("Hello!")
print("Hello!")

What if you wanted to print the same thing, say, a hundred times? It is clearly impractical to write this statement a hundred times. Instead, we'll use loops to execute this block of code.

This can be done through various different syntaxes. First, we introduce the for loop:

for i in range(100):
    print("Hello!")

Next, we show how you can write the same piece of code using a while loop:

i = 100
while i != 0:
    print("Hello!")
    i = i - 1

The Anatomy of a Loop

A loop has four parts:

• Initialization: Setting up the initial, starting value for the variable that our loop uses.

• Condition: The condition statement, which stops the looping when it becomes false.

• Execution Suite: The code inside the loop that gets executed every time the loop runs.

• Updation: Updating the looping variable to get us closer to making the condition false.

We use the while loop to mark out these four sections.

i = 100 # initialization
while i != 0: # condition
    print("Hello!") # execution suite
    i = i - 1 # updation

A for loop is similar, but with lots of this stuff hidden away behind the scenes. We iterate over the range, such that range is defined as range(start=0, stop, step=1) where our values start at start (inclusive), end at stop (exclusive) and proceed by step. As an example, range(1, 5, 2) would return the values 1 and 3. The default values for start and step are 0 and 1 respectively. Thus, something like

for i in range(10):
    print(i)

Prints out all the numbers from 1 to 9.

Difference between a for and a while loop

So when do we use a for loop and when do we use a while loop? There isn't any hard and fast rule, but the general rule of thumb is this: if we have a fixed number of times we want to loop over a piece of code, use a for loop. If the number of times we loop over something depends over a condition without a fixed number, use a while loop.

We'll attempt enough examples with both to get intuition about when to use which one!