While and For Loops

Question

"while" and "for" loops look pretty the same for me, doing the same function. Please correct me if they are different

Answer 1

1. while loops - are used when you are unsure of how many times an action should occur (i.e. validaing user input).

2. for loops - are used when you know exactly how many times an action will be repeated (i.e. getting the sum of an int array).

Also: 3. do-while loops: are used when you need the action to occur atleast once (similar to while loop).

Hope this helps!

Gud Luk!

-bErN

Answer 2

They are very similar, but the main difference is that while loops run for an unknown duration whereas for loops the duration is known ahead of time. There is a fundamental difference between, "process the next 10 bytes of data" and "process data until you see a '0'."

Answer 3

Both while and for loop do the same thing, the difference is their syntaxes and the ways of using them, if you want the loop to execute for a number of times say x you can use for loop. if you want to execute loop till a condition matches use while loop.
for example
to run loop x times

for(int i=0;i<x;i++)
{
//loop body
}

you can do the same with while loop but it will add more lines to your code

int i =0;
while(i<x)
{
//loop body
i++;
}

Now if you don't know how many times loops will execute or if you want to execute loop till a condition is met you can use while loop as follows:

while(true) //forever loop
{
if(condtion==true)
break; //stop the loop if condition is true
}

now using for loop:

for(;;;)
{
if(condition==true)
break;
}

in this case, both code do the same thing but while loop look clear :)