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The Web in Focus Your Fourth Program We're still on the subject of programming for this installment of The Web in Focus. If you're not interested in programming, there are still a few concepts you should understand to help you recognize that, while a program might be cool, it's not magic! From the previous beginning-programming articles, we discussed some principles of programming that you should be aware of. The computer is a picky beast that only does what you tell it to. If it doesn't understand what you are saying, it either does nothing or gives you an error message (sometimes helpful, sometimes not). You have to be very attuned to details when programming -- the statements must be correct and complete. Otherwise you'll get errors. And the computer won't make assumptions for you and fill in where you forgot something, no matter how obvious. You also need patience. The computer doesn't care if you're getting frustrated and feeling like tossing it out the nearest window. Programs are written using statements which are like sentences (or commands). Statements tell the computer to do something. Normally, the computer executes the statements in the order they occur, but there are other statements that can change the order (also known as "flow of control"). In the second and third articles, we saw a conditional statement -- an if. That allows us to see if something is true or not and do different things based upon whether that something was true or false. Repeating yourself Sometimes we want to do the something more than one time -- maybe pick 6 lottery numbers, for example. We could write out how to do that like so... Pick first number. Pick second number. Pick third number. Pick fourth number. Pick fifth number. Pick sixth number. Repeating the pick action six times by writing each one out individually is tiresome and unnecessarily lengthy. We could just say... Repeat this six times:     Pick a number This notion is the essence of a loop in programming. Page 2

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