Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days , Fifth Edition

Day 7. More on Program Flow

Programs accomplish most of their work by branching and looping. On Day 4, “Creating Expressions and Statements,” you learned how to branch your program using the if statement.

Today, you will learn

• What loops are and how they are used

• How to build various loops

• An alternative to deeply nested if...else statements

Looping

Many programming problems are solved by repeatedly acting on the same data. Two ways to do this are recursion (discussed on Day 5, “Organizing into Functions”) and iteration. Iteration means doing the same thing again and again. The principal method of iteration is the loop.

The Roots of Looping: goto

In the primitive days of early computer science, programs were nasty, brutish, and short. ...