General lua question: What is the difference between if/then and while/do?

[Nornan12]

The reason I ask is because I first thought that if/then statements could be used in individual instances in which a condition only appears once and while/do would be used while a condition exists for a period of time (hence, it being while/do.) But After putting some more thought into it, I figured that if/then is meant to handle conditions that exist for one tick, while while/do handles conditions that exist for multiple ticks. But if that's the case, what's the point of using while/do as opposed to using if/then repeatedly and vice-versa?

tl;dr: read title

[EvacX]

Loops (while/for/repeat) can't handle conditions that "exist for multiple ticks", don't know where you heard that from.

If statements are meant to execute a block of code if their condition evaluates to true, loops are meant to repeat a block of code until it's stopped (in the case of while loops, when its condition no longer evaluates to true).

There's quite a big difference.

if:
[lua]
if true then
print( "Hello world" )
end

> Hello world
[/lua]

while:
[lua]
local i = 1

while i <= 2 do
print( "Hello world" )
i = i + 1
end

> Hello world
> Hello world
[/lua]

for:
[lua]
for i = 1, 3 do
print( "Hello world" )
end

> Hello world
> Hello world
> Hello world
[/lua]

[Kogitsune]

If represents a single logic branch that will only execute once per call.

if condition then
  DoSomething( )
else
  DoSomethingElse( )
end

While will run until a condition is met, and can run forever if you aren't careful.

Pickers = 3
apples = 0

while apples < 10 do
  if Pickers > 0 then
    Pickers = Pickers - 1
    apples = apples + 3
  else
    apples = apples - 2
    Pickers = Pickers + 1
  end
end

Then, we have a repeat loop, which is similar to a while loop.

Pickers = 3
apples = 0

repeat
  if Pickers > 0 then
    Pickers = Pickers - 1
    apples = apples + 3
  else
    apples = apples - 2
    Pickers = Pickers + 1
  end
until apples > 10

The main functional difference between while and repeat are that a while loop will not run if the initial condition is met, but a repeat will run at least once always.

And, of course, there is the standard for loop

for counter = 1, 10 do
  print( counter )
end

for counter = 10, 1, -1 do
  print( counter )
end

For flow control, we have two commands.
break, which will force you out of the current loop
continue, which will stop the current execution and start it again.

for counter = 1, 100 do
  if counter % 4 == 0 then
    --Don't do anything if divisible by four
    continue
 end

 print( counter )
end

That should print 1 through 100, skipping anything divisible by four, so

1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, ... 97, 98, 99

[Nornan12]

Wonderful, thank you all.