sometimes teachers teach to the test, so to speak, and don't really teach students what's really happening. IIRC the intro class i had in college taught for loops first because it was easier for them. memorize this syntax and it'll just work, vs pay attention to your while condition, increment some variable, and understand what's really happening.

on a tangent, i visited my high school when i was a college student. i remember most of the math class in high school seemed to think induction could only be used to prove formulas like sum(1 to n) = n*(n+1) /2. the teacher never gave them any other kind of example.

The for loop is in preparation of the next assignment where I will be utilizing the k.

Although I'd like to say I planned for that. I chose for loop because It was simple to make an infinite loop out of.

As for the order of the way they were taugght. All loops were taught on the same day in the same chapter.

The order they were introduced in the chapter was;

for -> while -> do while


e/ sorry for the messy code. I understand what each loop is doing. and I know when to use a for/while loop over a do while loop, but I don't think I know when to use while over for and vice versa. the way I have been doing is:

use while when the test condition is based on user input

use for loop when the test condition is some kind of count.

This post was edited by kasey21 on Mar 7 2014 01:07am

how is this:


easier or more readable than this:


?

never learned while (true) before.

book actually taught how to make infinite loops with the for. Never mentioned while(true) before.

so my ignorance made it more readable .

the first looks like a mistake at best (Eg: forgot condition, forgot to use k), terrible code at worse. if you insist on using infinite for loop, drop the unused variable k altogether:

Thanks.

was actually taught the for(;;)

Totally slipped my mind when writing. Will do that for this assignment then put the k back in for the next since Ill actually be using the count.


Just wondering. Is there a reason while(true) is preferred over for(;;) ?

Let me ask you. Suppose the "for" syntax used 20 params instead of just 3. which would you prefer?


or


now think about the reasons you used to come up with your answer, and ask yourself how/why does your answer change from 20 params to 3?

This post was edited by carteblanche on Mar 7 2014 01:47am

I feel like you just Monty Hall'd that explanation. Well done lol.

For loops are called iterative loops. They are used when you want to iterate through a collection or count something. Keeping track of the current iteration is normally beneficial for them.

While/do while are conditional loops. They just loop while a condition is met. While is the pre test loop do while is the post test. Depending on when you want the condition checked is when you use them. The reason while(true) seems foreign to you stems from the typical delimma students have when it comes to Boolean expressions. They can't visualize that a Boolean expression evaluates to a Boolean. A lot of times you will see



In student code because they fail to grasp that since x is a Boolean you could just say