Looping

If you have any experience with looping in other programming languages, you will find Python's way of looping a bit different. First of all, what is looping? Looping means being able to repeat the execution of a code block more than once, according to the loop parameters we're given. There are different looping constructs, which serve different purposes, and Python has distilled all of them down to just two, which you can use to achieve everything you need. These are the for and while statements.

While it's definitely possible to do everything you need using either of them, they serve different purposes and therefore they're usually used in different contexts. We'll explore this difference thoroughly in this chapter.

The for loop

The for loop is used when looping over a sequence, such as a list, tuple, or a collection of objects. Let's start with a simple example and expand on the concept to see what the Python syntax allows us to do:

# simple.for.py
for number in [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]: 
...