While

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while in conjunction with do repeats a statement as long as a condition evaluates to true. The condition expression is evaluated prior each iteration, determining whether the following statement is executed. This is the main difference to a repeat … until-loop, where the loop body is executed at any rate, but succeeding iterations do not necessarily happen, though.

The following example contains unreachable code:

program whileFalse(input, output, stderr);

begin
	while false do
	begin
		writeLn('never gets printed');
	end;
end.

You usually use while-loops where, in contrast to for-loops, a running index variable is not required, the statement executed can't be deduced from an index that's incremented by one, or to avoid a break-statement (which usually indicates bad programming style).

program whileDemo(input, output, stderr);

var
	x: integer;
begin
	x := 1;
	
	// prints non-negative integer powers of two
	while x < high(x) div 2 do
	begin
		writeLn(x);
		inc(x, x); // x := x + x
	end;
end.

You can use Continue to jump to the end of the loop. In the example below all values from 1 to 10 are printed, except 5.

program whileDemo(input, output, stderr);
var
  i:integer=0;
begin
  while true do
  begin
    inc(i);
    if i>10 then break;
    if i=5 then continue;
    writeLn(i);
  end;
end;

see also

• Infinite loop

Keywords: begin — do — else — end — for — if — repeat — then — until — while