how does while work

i am having some problems with a program that i am writing and i think that
knowing how the while command works will help me to figure out where i am
going wrong
*when do you get kicked out of a while loop?*
(i.e., in the following example  what would the final value of 'a' be?) i
thought it would be 99 but running it in R i get 101 (and 101 for x too!)

while (x <100) {
  for (i in 1:101) {
    i -> x
    x -> a
  }
*here*  
}

Essentially the while condition doesn't get checked until just before the
last curly brace (where I inserted *here* above), so the for loop gets to
do it's thing until i (and x and a) reach 101 and only then is the while
condition allowed to drop you out of the loop.

while this is a crude example, it is the basic form of what i am trying to
do, and i am guessing that while is not what i am looking for...

what exactly are you trying to do?

daver

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+ Dept. of Sociology          complex scientific      + 
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