⚠️ Disclaimer: These notes were generated from a live lecture transcript compiled with Claude Sonnet 4.6. Some code examples have been reconstructed from verbal descriptions and may contain minor inaccuracies. Q&A entries labelled (Implicit) are inferred from context rather than explicit exchanges. Always cross-reference with official course materials on Canvas and the Ed platform.

41039 Programming 1 — Week 4 Lecture Notes

Topic: Repetition (Loops), Arrays, Lists, Tuples & Record Classes

Autumn 2026 | Lecturer: Dr. Luke Mathieson

• Click to show/hide table of contents

0. Administrative Notes

• This is a pre-recorded lecture — the lecturer was overseas during the recording.
• Because there is no live audience, there are no live Q&A exchanges in this lecture. The format is more compact than usual.
• Students are still encouraged to post questions in the course forum.
• Important: There is a referenced lesson about mixing string and non-string Scanner input in Java — review this before the Week 4 lab assessment.

1. Course Roadmap — Where We Are

The course is built around a triad of basic programming language constructs:

These three concepts form the complete foundation of imperative programming. The lecturer notes:

“Anyone who goes off and learns assembly code will find that basically these are the only three things you can do.”

State, decision, and repetition are deeply intertwined:

• Decision needs state — you check the value of a variable to decide which branch to take.
• Repetition needs decision — you check a condition each iteration to decide whether to continue.
• Repetition modifies state — the loop changes variables, and those changes eventually end the loop.

2. What Is Repetition?