Basic While Loop with If Statement - r

Question

I'm creating a basic function that runs a while loop and an if statement for an R class and am looking for help.
I don't want to overcomplicate things, so I'd prefer to stick to just the basics with this answer.
I created a basic football score function that's intention is to add 7 points to the score if yards >=80, add 3 points to the total score if yards >= 60 (with else if), and add 0 to the total score if anything <= 60.
This is where I have started:
teamA <- function(drives) {
i <- 0
score <- 0
while (i < drives){
yards <- sample(0:100,1)
if (yards >= 80){
score <- score + 7
}
else if (yards >= 60){
score <- score + 3
}
else {
score <- score
}
i <- i + 1
return (score)
}
}
teamA(5)
This is obviously not accurate to real football, but I wanted to simplify it for class.
I wanted to make a function where you could specify an amount of drives a team had and compile a score based on a random amount of yards generated by the sample I wrote in the while loop.
Would anyone be able to help fix this code? I'm not very experienced with R and can't think of the best way to solve my issue.
My biggest issue right now is that it seems like I'm only getting one score returned and not compiling a total score.

Answer 1

The problem in your code is that you've placed return(score) in the while loop. return terminates the function and returns the corresponding value. Therefore, your function always gets terminated after the first iteration of your loop.
Another edit I made to your code is to remove the last condition, because it doesn't change the value of score.
set.seed(4)
teamA <- function(drives) {
i <- 0
score <- 0
while (i < drives) {
yards <- sample(0:100,1)
if (yards >= 80) {
score <- score + 7
}
else if (yards >= 60) {
score <- score + 3
}
i <- i + 1
}
return(score)
}
teamA(5)
[1] 6
An easy way to debug such functions is to place a browser() in the code and see what happens in the function.