if Statements and Control Flow

If Statements and Control Flow

What are If Statements?

  • If statements are used in programming to perform different actions based on different conditions.
  • They are a way to make decisions in your code based on the evaluation of one or more conditions.
  • They can be combined with logical operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to make more complex decision-making scenarios.

Structure of If Statements

  • An if statement starts with the keyword if followed by a condition enclosed in parentheses ().
  • The condition is a boolean expression that evaluates to either true or false.
  • The controlled code block, the code to be executed if the condition is true, is enclosed in curly braces {}. This code block is often referred to as the “if block”.

Else Clause

  • An else clause can be added to an if statement to specify a block of code to be executed if the condition is false.
  • The else clause starts with the keyword else followed by the additional code block enclosed in curly braces {}.

Else If Statement

  • Else if statement is used to specify a new condition to test if the first condition is false.
  • You can have as many else if statements as you want in an if statement, but they must come before the else clause.

Nested If Statements

  • Nested if statements means an if statement inside another if statement.
  • They are used for testing multiple conditions where each condition is nested inside the condition before it.

Control Flow

  • Control flow in programming refers to the order in which the code is executed.
  • By using if statements, programs can control what code is executed based on specific conditions being met.

Importance of Condition Order

  • The order of conditions in an if statement is important.
  • Conditions are checked in order from top to bottom, so the first condition that is true will be executed.
  • Once a condition is found to be true, the program will execute the corresponding code block and will not check the remaining conditions.

Comparison Operators

  • Comparison operators are used in the conditions of if statements.
  • They include equality (==), inequality (!=), greater than (>), less than (<), greater than or equal to (>=), and less than or equal to (<=).
  • These operators compare two values and return true or false.