For Me?

Loops where we initialize some variable, test that variable in the loop condition and then modify the variable in the loop are so common that C gives us another looping statement to deal with them. It is the

for

statement and its general form is

for( expression 1; expression 2; expression 3 )
   statement

The operation of this statement is illustrated in this flow chart.

[For loop flow chart]

From the flow chart, we can see that the statement is equivalent to a while that's set up like this:

expression 1;
while(expression 2) {
   statement
   expression 3;
}

(This equivalence is almost exact. The

for

and the "equivalent"


while

will behave differently under the


continue

statement that we'll see a little later .)

By way of example, we could print out the numbers from 0 to 9 using a for statement like this:

for(i = 0; i < 10; i++)
   printf("%d\n", i);

And like with the other statements, we can group multiple statements in the body of the loop by enclosing them in braces (

{}

The for is much like the counted loop statement discussed earlier , but it is more flexible. Instead of just counting by one, we can do any form of updating we want in expression 3. For example, to print out just the even numbers we could do something like this:

for(i = 0; i < 10; i += 2)
   printf("%d\n", i);

Write a

for

statement which counts the variable

down from 10 to (but not including) 0.