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Unconditional branch instructions such as GOTO are used to unconditionally jump to a different instruction sequence. If the algorithm requires a conditional branch, the GOTO (or GOSUB subroutine call) is preceded by an IF-THEN statement specifying the condition(s).
Dispatch table a branch table by another name used for late binding; Function pointer arrays of addresses to functions as used in branch tables; Indirect branch; Lookup table an array of items to be matched, sometimes holding pre-calculated results; Switch statement a high level language conditional statement that may generate a branch table
Within an imperative programming language, a control flow statement is a statement that results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths to follow. For non-strict functional languages, functions and language constructs exist to achieve the same result, but they are usually not termed control flow statements.
Unconditional branching statements allow an execution sequence to be transferred to another part of a program. These include the jump (called goto in many languages), switch , and the subprogram, subroutine , or procedure call (which usually returns to the next statement after the call).
switch a.k.a. case statements, a form of multiway branching; These new language mechanisms replaced equivalent flows which previously would have been written using gotos and ifs. Multi-way branching replaces the "computed goto" in which the instruction to jump to is determined dynamically (conditionally).
Predicated instructions with different predicates can be mixed with each other and with unconditional code, allowing better instruction scheduling and so even better performance. Elimination of unnecessary branch instructions can make the execution of necessary branches, such as those that make up loops, faster by lessening the load on branch ...
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.
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.