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(emacs-lisp-intro.info)Incrementing Example

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Example with incrementing counter
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   Suppose you are playing on the beach and decide to make a triangle of
pebbles, putting one pebble in the first row, two in the second row,
three in the third row and so on, like this:


                    *
                   * *
                  * * *
                 * * * *



(About 2500 years ago, Pythagoras and others developed the beginnings of
number theory by considering questions such as this.)

   Suppose you want to know how many pebbles you will need to make a
triangle with 7 rows?

   Clearly, what you need to do is add up the numbers from 1 to 7.
There are two ways to do this; start with the smallest number, one, and
add up the list in sequence, 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on; or start with the
largest number and add the list going down: 7, 6, 5, 4 and so on.
Because both mechanisms illustrate common ways of writing `while'
loops, we will create two examples, one counting up and the other
counting down.  In this first example, we will start with 1 and add 2,
3, 4 and so on.

   If you are just adding up a short list of numbers, the easiest way
to do it is to add up all the numbers at once.  However, if you do not
know ahead of time how many numbers your list will have, or if you want
to be prepared for a very long list, then you need to design your
addition so that what you do is repeat a simple process many times
instead of doing a more complex process once.

   For example, instead of adding up all the pebbles all at once, what
you can do is add the number of pebbles in the first row, 1, to the
number in the second row, 2, and then add the total of those two rows
to the third row, 3.  Then you can add the number in the fourth row, 4,
to the total of the first three rows; and so on.

   The critical characteristic of the process is that each repetitive
action is simple.  In this case, at each step we add only two numbers,
the number of pebbles in the row and the total already found.  This
process of adding two numbers is repeated again and again until the last
row has been added to the total of all the preceding rows.  In a more
complex loop the repetitive action might not be so simple, but it will
be simpler than doing everything all at once.