Heavy Wizardry 101

5SPELL OF THE UNDEAD: WRITING A REPL TO ANIMATE A BOTNET

As we get further in the book, we’ll want to implement more sophisticated projects, and for that we’ll need to know about a few more programming concepts. This chapter introduces conditionals and loops, collectively known as control structures or control flow. These constructs will allow us to write more complex and dynamic programs that make decisions in response to inputs. To illustrate how they work, we’re going to implement a read–evaluate–print loop, or REPL. This is a simple program that takes in user input, processes it, and prints a response, over and over again in a loop.