Table Of Contents

Previous topic

11. A character in a string

Next topic

13. Function arguments

This Page

12. For loops

Todo

Do:

for item in a_list:
   #
for letter in word:
   #
for _ in range(n):
   #

12.1. First, a look at while

Select world Around 1. You have seen before that Reeborg takes 9 steps before reaching the first square where he is blocked by having a wall in front of him. Let’s use the increment operator to have Reeborg keep track of the number of steps and stop just before hitting a wall:

number_of_steps = 0;
while number_of_steps < 9 :  # "<" means "less than"
    move()
    number_of_steps += 1

Try it!

Try to run the above. Then, modify the program to write the value of number_of_steps in Reeborg’s Diary each time it is incremented.

12.2. Now, it’s time for for

As we have seen, while loops can be used with numbers using the following pattern:

n = 0                 # initialization
while n < max_value : # condition to end the loop
    ...
    n += 1  # increment

Another way to write exactly the same program meaning is to use a for loop:

for n in range(max_value):
   ...

The for loop in Python can be used for much more than counting items. However, this will not be covered for now.

12.3. What about repeat?

As we had mentioned before, Reeborg’s World includes repeat as a keyword that is not found in Python. Using repeat, the above for loop would, in principle, be written as:

repeat max_value:
    ...

provided that max_value was an actual number. From now on, we will not use repeat and will use instead the normal Python way using a for loop.