REPEAT n TIMES

Copying a step forty times is slow to write, easy to get wrong, and hard to fix — change one thing and you have to change it in forty places. A loop fixes this by writing the step once and telling the program how many times to run it. REPEAT n TIMES is the simplest version: it names a count, n, and runs its body that many times, no more, no less.

Mechanically, REPEAT n TIMES keeps an internal count of how many passes it has done. Before each pass it checks whether that count has reached n. If not, it runs the body once and adds one to the count. Once the count equals n, the loop stops and the program moves on to whatever comes after it. No condition on the data is checked, just the number of passes — that is what separates REPEAT n TIMES from a conditional loop like REPEAT UNTIL.

This matters for what comes next in the unit because REPEAT n TIMES is the bridge between straight-line code and the more flexible loops. REPEAT UNTIL and general iteration statements run until some condition on the data becomes true, which might take an unknown number of passes or even never finish. REPEAT n TIMES always finishes after a fixed, countable number of steps, which makes it the natural tool for traversing a list of known length or repeating an action a set number of times, and a stepping stone toward thinking about how many steps an algorithm takes.