Hi! I am just starting to use Natural Language with NXT, and setup and writing simple programs has gone well. However, I notice that most of the sample code snippets are of the following form:

forward();
wait();
stop();

Can you tell me why the stop() is needed? My original thought was to put on the brakes instead of letting to robot coast to a stop, but when I tried it both ways, the robot seemed to stop in the same place with or without the stop(). Admittedly, I was just marking the
distances with electrical tape, so it was not a super precise experiment. At any rate, if you could satisfy my curiosity about this, I would really appreciate it.

The stop(); command by default applies a 'brake' command to the motors and stops them in place. This is useful for stopping the NXT motors from coasting past the intended travel point if the program then does other things.

In ROBOTC, the closing brace of task main() (the } at the end of the program) also sends a 'brake' command to all of the motors on the NXT as a safety feature; so in this particular program, removing the stop() command will result in similar behavior then the program with the stop() command. However, it is always good practice to explicitly stop the motors whenever you want them to stop to ensure that the robot does not coast past the desired point of travel.

This code:


Is not the same at this code: