Loops in Ruby

Loops, together with Iteration, may not be one of the most important and handy tools in programming. Any code without looping (where it is applicable) would be impossible or, at least, a nightmare in programming, requiring many lines of unnecessary code, undermining abstraction, and making our code difficult to write and to read. But first of all, we are to differentiate looping from iteration. Iteration requires an array and runs over its arguments while for looping a programmer must set conditions like: do anything for a certain time; do anything while something is true, don’t do anything unless something is true. There are various types of looping related to the task we would like to complete. Here are some examples:

A simple loop:

loop do
puts "infinite loop" #body
end

As you can suggest from the puts method, we should avoid such type of looping while our computer memory it imminently runs out of space. We don’t want that to happen, do we? We can control our loop by setting start and end, preventing it to run without purpose and infinitely. In this controlled loop we should initiate starting and ending points (integers) the loop should iterate within:

count = 0 # to begin with
loop do
count +=1 # to increase by 1 after each execution
puts count
break
end

Let’s see what happened here! First of all, we set a variable called count to integer 0 outside of the loop. Then, inside of it, we increased this count variable value by 1 after each cycle (actually, we could increase steps by writing something like count += 5, which will increase the value by 5 after each cycle). But wait, what does += equation stand for? count += 1 equals to count = count + 1, which means literally, that the program will add 1 to the count variable each time after execution, gradually increasing it to the point when we command the program to stop. Then we ask Ruby to write down the value of count, by declaring puts count. And last, but not least, we command the program to break so that the loop doesn’t fill the universe of the program by running infinitely. But, as we see, there is very little use for the loop to break after the first cycle. So, how can we say Ruby to run for certain times while some condition is true?

count = 0 # to begin with
while count <= 5 # condition
puts count # execution
count += 1 # to increase by 1 after each execution
end

In this code, if we try to convert it to common language, it would sound something like this: start the count with 0, increase it while the count is less than or equal to 5, print count value after each looping. We noticed that initially, we wrote count = 0, then, at the end, count +=1. Both of these 2 lines of code are required for the loop to run, by setting the initial value, and increasing it while some condition is true (while count <= 5). Otherwise, it will never reach 5 and meet the condition.

You might think, that if we set our program to do something while some condition is met, can we also require it to do something opposite — do not execute until some condition is met? In other words, while works when the condition is true, whereas until runs as long as the condition is false. Turns out we can ask Ruby to do it in the following way:

until count < 0
  puts count
  count -= 1
end

Further, we can enhance our loop by adding some more functionality, or by setting a condition. , What if we want to perform something if a certain condition is true? for instance, what if we want to print only odd or even numbers? Let’s elaborate in the following code:

count = 0
while xcount<= 10
  if count.even?	
    puts count
  end
  count += 1
end

This one is more sophisticated as we declared to print count out only if that integer is even, by writing if count.even? which will execute each time, when this condition is true.

As one can suggest from the following examples, Loops are both necessity and luxury which helps solve many issues.