Looping Statements:
Consider the problem of computing the area of a circle with radius of 0.3 centimeters-a MATLAB program certainly is not required to do that; you would use your calculator rather than, and punch in π* 0.3 2. Though, if a table of circle areas is preferred, for radii ranging from 0.1 centimeters to 100 centimeters in steps of 0.05 (example 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, etc.), it would be very tiresome to use a calculator and write it all down. This is one of the huge uses of a computer-the ability to repeat a process such as this.
This section will cover statements in MATLAB which allow the other statement(s) to be repeated. The statements which do this are known as the looping statements, or loops. There are two basic types of loops in the programming: counted loops, and conditional loops. The counted loop is one which repeats statements in a specified number of times (example, ahead of time it is known how many times the statements are to be repeated). In a counted loop, for illustration, you might tell 'repeat these statements 10 times.' The conditional loop also repeats the statements, but ahead of time it is not known how many times the statements will require to be repeated.
With a conditional loop, for illustration, you might tell 'repeat these statements until this condition becomes false.' The statement(s) which are repeated in any loop are known as the action of the loop.
There are two different loop statements in the MATLAB: the for statement and the while statement. In practice, the for statement generally used as the counted loop, and while is used as the conditional loop. To keep it easy, that is how they will be represented here.
Finally, though loops are extremely helpful in most programming applications, in MATLAB they are often not necessary, particularly when dealing with the arrays. The concept of vectorizing will be introduced, that is the term used in MATLAB for rewriting code which was written by using loops in a traditional programming language to matrix operations in the MATLAB.