Learning objectives

 

In this unit you will learn:

-   how to express repeated execution of statements using a while loop

-   how to use a while loop to compute a sum

-   how to use a while loop to manipulate cells in a Board object

 

One of the features that make computers so powerful is their ability to manipulate a large amount of data very quickly.  For many problems, this requires the computer to perform an operation or a set of operations several times, a concept that we refer to as repeated execution.  If we’re going to have a separate Java statement for each operation, our Java code will grow unmanageably large, not to mention how dull and tedious of a task programming will be.  This is why programming languages such as Java include constructs that allow us to control how many times a set of statements executes.  Such constructs are called loops (for obvious reasons), and Java has a handful types of loops defined in it.  The first one we’ll look at is the while loop.