Foreach loop

foreach loops are almost always used to iterate over items in a sequence of elements.

In computer programming, foreach loop (or for-each loop) is a control flow statement for traversing items in a collection. foreach is usually used in place of a standard for loop statement. Unlike other for loop constructs, however, foreach loops[1] usually maintain no explicit counter: they essentially say "do this to everything in this set", rather than "do this x times". This avoids potential off-by-one errors and makes code simpler to read. In object-oriented languages, an iterator, even if implicit, is often used as the means of traversal.

The foreach statement in some languages has some defined order, processing each item in the collection from the first to the last. The foreach statement in many other languages, especially array programming languages, does not have any particular order. This simplifies loop optimization in general and in particular allows vector processing of items in the collection concurrently.

  1. ^ "D Programming Language foreach Statement Documentation". Digital Mars. Retrieved 2008-08-04.