What is iteration in c programming?

Answer 1

Iteration means what it says: the act of repeating a process. Each repetition of the process is itself an iteration, and the results of one iteration can be applied in the next iteration. Counting from 1 to 10 is an example of an iterative process because each iteration increments the counter by 1.

Iteration should not be confused with recursion. Although similar, a recursion occurs when a function calls itself. Such functions are known as recursive functions and these make use of the call stack to remember the "state" of each function prior to the next call, thus allowing those states to be restored when the recursive calls return (known as "unwinding"). Since the call stack must be maintained regardless of the depth of calls, recursive routines that do not need to remember the state of each recursion are inefficient, and are often better implemented as iterative loops. However, this may require nested iterations and, if the depth is too variable or complex to be calculated at compile time, or the maximum depth would be greater than 16 then the cost of recursion will often be preferred to the increased code size iteration would incur. Even so, recursive functions can often be inline expanded by the compiler as iterative functions, thus simplifying the source code without sacrificing the performance.

Answer 2

In iteration is an instance of a loop (for, while or do-while).