Difference in for loops?
Alright, this is fairly easy but I can't seem to figure it out. How do you change whether, in a for loop, the increment is less than/greater than/ less than or equal to/ greater than or equal to. This is NOT an infinite loop, look closely!
for i = 5, 1, -.2 do
print(i)
end
--Doesn't print 1 at the end, how do i fix this other than setting the second value to 0.8?
1 answer
This is a problem with numbers on our computer not having infinite precision. When you write 0.1, it doesn't actually store is as "one tenth". It stores it as a base-2 approximation of 0.1, which is something like this:
0.10000000000000000555111512312578
That means the number you get after you get just around 1 is about 20 * .00000000000000000555111512312578 under 1, so it declares the loop over.
The simplest solution is to use integers, and divide on the inside:
for I = 50, 10, -2 do
local i = I * 0.1
end
Depending on what you are doing, other options might make sense. For example, if you're doing something like an animation, you could not worry about the for loop altogether and just use the time:
local start = tick()
local duration = 4 -- (seconds)
while tick() < start + duration do
local time = tick() - start
local progress = time / duration
-- do stuff based on progress (which is 0 to 1)
wait()
end
0