Overview
In this tutorial, we will learn about the Flowgorithm While Loop Statement. The Flowgorithm tool offers three loop structures for repetitive statements in the flowcharts. The Looping structures are:
- While Loop
- For Loop
- Do While Loop
While Loop
The While loop statement is a repetition structure and is an indefinite loop. While loop structure is used when we don’t know how many iterations we need. When we want to loop until some condition is met etc.
While loop construct is a condition-controlled loop and is a pre-test loop structure. The loop condition is checked before executing the loop statements.
Add While Loop
To add a While loop construct, right-click the mouse on the control line and choose the While symbol/shape.
Double click on the While symbol to provide the Boolean expression in the While properties window. For each iteration, the Boolean expression is evaluated. If its expression evaluates to True, the loop statements are executed. This repetition continues until the Boolean expression evaluates to False.
Example
Assume a flowchart to print users’ friends’ names. The flowchart will prompt the user to enter a friend’s name one at a time. We will display the friend’s name on the console window. The flowchart will exit when the user enters “QUIT” as a friend’s name.
Steps:
Declare a variable to hold the user input.
Assign an initial value to an empty string.
Add a while loop to the flow chart. We use while because we don’t know how many names the user will enter during the flowchart runtime.
Add loop statements.
Sample Output
Execute the flowchart.
Indefinite Loop
While loops are indefinite loops that can run forever. Some applications are designed to run forever until they are interrupted by external signals. A real-world example of this is an application/web server that runs forever to service the client requests. Let’s simulate a loop that runs forever until it’s stopped.
The while loop runs until the conditions become false. If we provide a condition that never evaluates to false the loop runs forever.
Examples, conditions like:
while(1 = = 1)
while( True)
will always evaluate to True boolean truth value.
Sample run output
This flowchart will run forever until it is stopped by an external signal like a user stopping the flowchart or its encounters a runtime error.
Note that if the flowchart design doesn’t need an indefinite loop, this could be a defect or error in the design.
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Flowgorithm Tutorials Link:
https://www.testingdocs.com/flowgorithm-flowchart-tutorial/