Introduction

There are situations where you will want to run the same instructions for more than one time. There are two solutions to do that: one that's stupid and one that isn't. The stupid solution would be to copy and paste the code, but this is having a little problem: what will you do if you need to run the code an unknown number of times? Also if you need to run the same code for a lot of time do you really wanna to stay and copy and paste? The solution is pretty simple: you can use a repetitive statement.

while

This is the most basic form of a repetitive is the while loop. It will repeat it's content as long as a condition is true. You will mostly use it when you don't know how many times the code will need to repeat. The syntax is:

while(condition){
    ...
}

Example

int x=0;
while(x < 5){
    std::cout<<"*";
    ++x;
}

This will print *****.

for

for is another form of a repetitive loop. It's very similar to the while statement. You will mostly use it when you know the number of times the code needs to repeat. The syntax is:

for ( init; condition; increment ) {
    ...
} 

It works like this:

1. init- here you can declare variables. This is done only at the beginning of for
2. condition- if this condition is false than the code will stop executing. This is done before every repetition.
3. increment- here you can increment variables. This is done at the end of each repetition

Example

for ( int x = 0; x < 5; ++x ) {
    std::cout<<"*";
} 

This will print *****. init, condition and increment are optional. You can skip them and just put ; .