It's hardly a surprise that one of the first things that we learn as programmers is how to write a loop. One of my first loops in C++ was printing the numbers from 1 to 10:
for(int i = 0; i< 10; ++i){
cout << i << endl;
}
As a curious programmer, I took this syntax for granted, went over its peculiarities and complications, and just used it. Looking back, I realize that there are a few unusual things about this construct. First, why start with 0? I've been told it's a convention, due to historical reasons. Then, the for loop has three statements—an initialization, a condition, and an increment. This sounds slightly too complicated for what we're trying to achieve. Finally, the end condition forced me into more off-by-one errors than I'd like to admit.
At this point, you will realize that...
