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[a] Branch (or branching, branched) may also refer to the act of switching execution to a different instruction sequence as a result of executing a branch instruction. Branch instructions are used to implement control flow in program loops and conditionals (i.e., executing a particular sequence of instructions only if certain conditions are ...
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.
Multiway branch is the change to a program's control flow based upon a value matching a selected criteria. It is a form of conditional statement.A multiway branch is often the most efficient method of passing control to one of a set of program labels, especially if an index has been created beforehand from the raw data.
An indirect branch (also known as a computed jump, indirect jump and register-indirect jump) is a type of program control instruction present in some machine language instruction sets. Rather than specifying the address of the next instruction to execute , as in a direct branch , the argument specifies where the address is located.
In computer architecture, predication is a feature that provides an alternative to conditional transfer of control, as implemented by conditional branch machine instructions. Predication works by having conditional ( predicated ) non-branch instructions associated with a predicate , a Boolean value used by the instruction to control whether the ...
Branch prediction attempts to guess whether a conditional jump will be taken or not. Branch target prediction attempts to guess the target of a taken conditional or unconditional jump before it is computed by decoding and executing the instruction itself. Branch prediction and branch target prediction are often combined into the same circuitry.
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.
In computer programming, a branch table or jump table is a method of transferring program control to another part of a program (or a different program that may have been dynamically loaded) using a table of branch or jump instructions. It is a form of multiway branch.