Understanding brute-force repetition

In brute-force repetition, a statement or series of statements to be repeated is simply copied over and over the required number of times. This is the most restrictive form of repetition because the number of repeats is hardcoded in and can't be changed at runtime.

There are several other downsides to this type of repetition. First, what if you had to change one or more of the statements that have been copied over and over? Tedious would be the word to describe the work required to either change all of them (error-prone) or to delete, correct, and recopy the lines (also error-prone). Another downside is that it makes the code unnecessarily bulky. Copying 10 lines is one thing, but 100 or 1,000 is another thing altogether.

However, there are also times when copying a single statement multiple times is actually necessary. The situation where this occurs is in an advanced topic involving loop unrolling, which we will not cover in this book...