An if statement allows us to check a specific condition once. But what if that condition needs to be checked a certain number of times?

Definite loops can be used to repeat code a fixed number of times.

While an if statement only has a conditional expression (like number < 5), a definite loop has two additional components:

• An initial statement, which defines the starting value for a loop variable.
  Ex: number := 0
• A post statement, which defines what happens at the end of each loop iteration.
  Ex: number++

So while an if statement that prints one number less than 5 may look like this:

number := 3
if number < 5 {
  fmt.Println(number)
}
// Output: 3

A for loop that prints the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 would look like this:

for number := 0; number < 5; number++ {
  fmt.Print(number, " ")
}
// Output: 0 1 2 3 4

While the if statement prints a number once, the for loop uses a similar syntax to print a number five times.

Let’s dive deeper into each component of that definite loop:

• The initial statement, number := 0, creates a new variable to be used within the for loop code block.

• The conditional expression, number < 5, will stop the loop when number reaches the target value of 5.

• The post statement, number++, increases the value of the number variable by 1 each time the code block completes.

In this example, the amount of times that the number needed to be printed was known beforehand. But what do we do when we don’t know how many times a loop needs to run?

Find out more in the next exercise!