11.3.7. Repeated Execution

⁠11.3.7. Repeated Execution

Repeating boring tasks is one of the main uses of computers, which don't mind doing the same thing over and over again. More importantly, writing code once and using it many times is much more intelligent than writing the same code many times. Repetition of the same code is often problematic, and repetition with subtle differences is even worse. Errors in this kind of code are difficult to find in the first place, and more difficult to solve effectively. Thankfully, as with most other things, SuperCollider offers a wide variety of ways to repeat code without re-writing it.

The code structure used to create repetition is normally called a loop. "Do" loops are SuperCollider's most versatile and useful repetition structure, and there are a few different ways to think about and write it. The "while" loop is a standard of most programming languages.

⁠11.3.7.1. "Do This to Everything in This Collection"

One way to write a "do" loop is basically the same as telling the interpreter to "do this Function to every element in this Collection." The syntax looks like this:

do(aCollection, aFunction(number, number));

... or like this:

aCollection.do(aFunction(number, number));

This causes aFunction to be executed once for each element in aCollection, which can be any kind of Collection. Each time aFunction is run, it is given two arguments, in this order: an element of aCollection, and the elements index number. For Collection's that don't have index numbers, it returns what the element's index number would have been. The loop always begins at the start of the Collection, and progresses with each element in order to the end. The second argument, really, is the integers from zero to one less than the number of elements in the Collection, increasing by one each time the loop executes aFunction.