Nested Loops in Pro-Bot

A nested loop is a loop inside another loop.

To show you an example of a nested loop, let’s go back to our PE class story. Imagine that your PE teacher has asked you to do 10 jumping jacks, every time you finish running a lap. You plan to run 4 laps today.

For the first lap, you start running and when you finish the lap, you do 10 jumping jacks. For the second lap, you do the same: run the lap, then do 10 jumping jacks. You will repeat the same process for each lap till you have finished running all 4 laps and the jumping jacks associated with each one.

Now, we already know that we can use a Repeat Loop to represent running our laps. We could write it as:

Rpt 4 [

       Run one lap around the field

]

We can also see in our above example that it is possible to write our jumping jacks activity as a Repeat Loop, since it represents the same action repeated multiple times. We could write it as:

Rpt 10 [

       Do one jumping jack

]

Combining these two actions, we can write the following program for our PE class exercise:

Rpt 4 [

       Run one lap around the field

       Rpt 10 [

              Do one jumping jack

       ]

]

So there you have your example. Your “jumping jacks” loop is nested inside your “laps around the field” loop. You can call the “jumping jacks” loop the “inner” loop, since it is sitting (or nested) inside another loop (which we will call the “outer” loop).

Let us look at another example. Here is a simple piece of code for your Pro-Bot that uses Nested Loops. We will expand the loops to see how it works.

Example:

Rpt 3  [

Rpt 2  [

Fd 5

Rt 

]

]

This code has an “outer” Repeat Loop, consisting of some instructions, that will execute 3 times. “Nested” inside that loop, there is another Repeat Loop that will execute 2 times. The instructions “Fd 5, Rt” are within this “inner” loop. Each time that you run the outer loop, the inner loop will execute twice, as shown in the code below.

Rpt 3  [

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

]

This is how the above program will look when written without any loops:

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

Fd 5

Rt

The number of times the instructions inside the inner loop executes = 
The number of times the outer loop repeats  X  The number of times the inner loop repeats

In the above example, the number of times the outer loop repeats = 3.

The number of times the inner loop repeats = 2.

So, the total number of times to repeat the instructions within the inner loop = 3 X 2 = 6.

It is also possible to nest more than two loops. That is, you can have a loop inside a loop inside a loop. Or a loop inside a loop inside a loop inside a loop…