Before we get to writing our own loops, let’s explore what programming would be like if we couldn’t use loops.

Let’s say we have a list of ingredients and we want to print every element in the list:

ingredients = ["milk", "sugar", "vanilla extract", "dough", "chocolate"]

If we only use print(), our program might look like this:

print(ingredients[0])
print(ingredients[1])
print(ingredients[2])
print(ingredients[3])
print(ingredients[4])

The output would be:

milk
sugar
vanilla extract
dough
chocolate

That’s still manageable, We’re writing 5 print() statements (or copying and pasting a few times). Now imagine if we come back to this program and our list had 10, or 24601, or … 100,000,000 elements? It would take an extremely long time and by the end, we could still end up with inconsistencies and mistakes.

Don’t dwell too long on this tedious scenario — we’ll learn how loops can help us out in the next exercise. For now, let’s gain an appreciation for loops.