While

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while in conjunction with do repeats a statement as long as a condition evaluates to true. The condition expression is evaluated prior each iteration, determining whether the following block (or single statement) is executed. This is the main difference to a repeat … until-loop, where the block is executed at any rate, but succeeding iterations do not necessarily happen, though.

The following example contains unreachable code:

1program whileFalse(input, output, stderr);
2
3begin
4	while false do
5	begin
6		writeLn('never gets printed');
7	end;
8end.

You usually use while-loops where, in contrast to for-loops, a running index variable is not required, the block executed can't be deduced from an index that's incremented by one, or to avoid a break-statement (which usually indicates bad programming style).

 1program whileDemo(input, output, stderr);
 2
 3var
 4	x: integer;
 5begin
 6	x := 1;
 7	
 8	// prints non-negative integer powers of two
 9	while x < high(x) div 2 do
10	begin
11		writeLn(x);
12		inc(x, x); // x := x + x
13	end;
14end.

See also

• Infinite loop

Keywords: begin — do — else — end — for — if — repeat — then — until — while