Design Recipe for Iterative Loops

Under construction

Algorithm

Figure out how you would solve the problem yourself, if there were no such thing as a computer. Write this down as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

Define variables

Choose the variables that are important to the loop, including any values calculated by the loop, values modified by the loop, and values necessary to control the loop. Write down (in English) any relationships among these variables that should be true, e.g. "counter indicates the number of employees we've already examined, and lowPaid indicates how many of the first counter employees are paid less than $10/hour."

Write loop skeleton

The syntactic form of most while-loops (the most common kind) in Java is pretty much the same:

declarations and initialization
while (condition) {
      body
      }
clean-up and summary