A for loop is useful when you know in advance the number of iterations to be executed. The for loop consists of three parts each of which is separated by a semicolon (;). The first part is initialization of the variable for iteration, the second part is a test of the iteration variable and if this test fails, the loop is finished. The third part is a counter for the iteration variable. A block can be followed after the for statement (no semicolon !!) to execute multiple statements for each iteration