What Are Loops?

Programming often requires you to perform the same action multiple times. This is where loops come in. A loop is a programming construct that repeats a block of code as long as a certain condition is met. Imagine you need to water three plants every morning. Instead of saying, "Water plant one, water plant two, water plant three," you might say, "For each plant, water it." This real-world analogy captures the idea of loops: they help you repeat actions efficiently without writing the same instructions over and over.

Manually repeating statements, as in the example above, quickly becomes inefficient and error-prone if you need to scale up to more repetitions or make changes. If you wanted to print numbers from 1 to 100, writing out one hundred separate print statements would be impractical. Loops solve this problem by letting you write a single block of code that can repeat as many times as needed, making your programs shorter, easier to maintain, and less likely to contain mistakes.