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If-then-else flow diagram A nested if–then–else flow diagram. In computer science, conditionals (that is, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs) are programming language constructs that perform different computations or actions or return different values depending on the value of a Boolean expression, called a condition.
The dangling else is a problem in programming of parser generators in which an optional else clause in an if–then(–else) statement can make nested conditional statements ambiguous. Formally, the reference context-free grammar of the language is ambiguous, meaning there is more than one correct parse tree.
The detailed semantics of "the" ternary operator as well as its syntax differs significantly from language to language. A top level distinction from one language to another is whether the expressions permit side effects (as in most procedural languages) and whether the language provides short-circuit evaluation semantics, whereby only the selected expression is evaluated (most standard ...
Many languages have an operator to accomplish the same purpose, generally referred to as a conditional operator (or, less precisely, as a ternary operator); the best known is ?:, as used in C, C++, and related languages. Some of the problems with the IIf function, as discussed later, do not exist with a conditional operator, because the ...
As an imperative language, C uses statements to specify actions. The most common statement is an expression statement, consisting of an expression to be evaluated, followed by a semicolon; as a side effect of the evaluation, functions may be called and variables assigned new values. To modify the normal sequential execution of statements, C ...
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
A conditional loop has the potential to become an infinite loop when nothing in the loop's body can affect the outcome of the loop's conditional statement. However, infinite loops can sometimes be used purposely, often with an exit from the loop built into the loop implementation for every computer language , but many share the same basic ...
Short-circuit evaluation, minimal evaluation, or McCarthy evaluation (after John McCarthy) is the semantics of some Boolean operators in some programming languages in which the second argument is executed or evaluated only if the first argument does not suffice to determine the value of the expression: when the first argument of the AND function evaluates to false, the overall value must be ...