Why does smartpy use sp.for/sp.while instead of the default loops provided by python?

Question

So I just started out with smartpy and I am kinda confused about the point of having separate expression for loops. My understanding is that it is may be because it's a part of on-chain computations, but I'm not quite sure.
When using the default for loop expression, I got this error:
Error: 'Expr' object cannot be interpreted as an integer
 for i in range(1, params.op + 1):

FFF · Accepted Answer

Your understanding is quite correct.
SmartPy is a Python library, not a Python-inspired language so we use Python everywhere and overload Python's constructions.
This approach is called meta-programming and is extremely important for bigger templates.
Control operators such as if, for, while cannot be overloaded in Python. So we have our own pure-python ones sp.if_, sp.for_, etc., and use some syntax transformation, called syntactic sugar, to present them nicely to developers.
Some information is here: https://www.smartpy.io/dev/reference.html#_control_and_syntactic_sugar
Your first error is in the range, you should use sp.range since params.op is a SmartPy expression, not an integer (as Python is telling you).
Then, you will need to you sp.for as SmartPy will tell you because this needs to be executed on-chain, not at compile time.

Why does smartpy use sp.for/sp.while instead of the default loops provided by python?

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