Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
Switch statements come in two main variants: a structured switch, as in Pascal, which takes exactly one branch, and an unstructured switch, as in C, which functions as a type of goto. The main reasons for using a switch include improving clarity, by reducing otherwise repetitive coding, and (if the heuristics permit) also offering the potential ...
At the level of functions, this is a return statement. At the level of loops, this is a break statement (terminate the loop) or continue statement (terminate the current iteration, proceed with next iteration). In structured programming, these can be replicated by adding additional branches or tests, but for returns from nested code this can ...
Pseudocode is commonly used in textbooks and scientific publications related to computer science and numerical computation to describe algorithms in a way that is accessible to programmers regardless of their familiarity with specific programming languages.
Executing a set of statements only if some condition is met (choice - i.e., conditional branch) Executing a set of statements zero or more times, until some condition is met (i.e., loop - the same as conditional branch) Executing a set of distant statements, after which the flow of control usually returns (subroutines, coroutines, and ...
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 ...
Wherever logic is applied, especially in mathematical discussions, it has the same meaning as above: it is an abbreviation for if and only if, indicating that one statement is both necessary and sufficient for the other. This is an example of mathematical jargon (although, as noted above, if is more often used than iff in statements of definition).