Thanks Rambutan for still providing golden nuggets of knowledge 6 years later! I'm new too and while I did solve the problem this is a great explaination/break down on incrementing and loops.

Its good practice to brake operations into a few function. This would increase readability and reusability. Plus you can unit test functions seperately.

so simple

thanks! We all start off at the beginning!

Thank you so much, this is an amazing answer! I was forgetting to make it "i += 1" rather that "i + 1" because, as I said, I'm very inexperienced.

var i = 1
i + 1 = 2

the value of i is not changed by this.

the for loop has the following structure

initial state(i = 1)
while condition ( i is less than or equal to n)
increment value (how much i will increase each loop

i + 1 does not provide a consistent increase. it is an expression that evaluates to the number 2

the correct why to express this is:

i = i + 1

that is take the current value of i (whatever it currently it is) and add 1 to it
then assign this new value to i

so if var i = 1
i = i + 1 // i is now 2
i = i + 1 // i is now 3

if you write :

for (var i = 1; i <= n; i = i + 1)

the loop will work correctly

BUT a shorthand for writing i = i + 1 is:

i += 1

so this also works

for (var i =1; i <= n; i += 1)

and there is a further shorthand for i += 1

and that is :

i++

finally you have the commonest for loop:

for (var i = 1; i <= n; i++)

actually, it's not quite the commonest. that would be:

for (var i = 0; i < n; i++)

but i + 1 as an incrementer doesn't work