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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.
compact code structure (despite repeated branch opcodes) reduced source statements (versus repetitive If statements) reduced requirement to test return codes individually (if used at call site to determine subsequent program flow) Algorithmic and code efficiency (data need only be encoded once and branch table code is usually compact), and the ...
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).
The control table entries are then much more similar to conditional statements in procedural languages but, crucially, without the actual (language dependent) conditional statements (i.e. instructions) being present (the generic code is physically in the interpreter that processes the table entries, not in the table itself – which simply ...
Historically, branch prediction took statistics, and used the result to optimize code. A programmer would compile a test version of a program, and run it with test data. The test code counted how the branches were actually taken. The statistics from the test code were then used by the compiler to optimize the branches of released code.
Switch statements (or case statements, or multiway branches) compare a given value with specified constants and take action according to the first constant to match. There is usually a provision for a default action ("else", "otherwise") to be taken if no match succeeds. Switch statements can allow compiler optimizations, such as lookup tables.
From January 2011 to December 2012, if you bought shares in companies when Anne M. Finucane joined the board, and sold them when she left, you would have a 37.9 percent return on your investment, compared to a 12.1 percent return from the S&P 500.
The earliest Fortran compilers supported the computed GOTO statement for multi-way branching. Early ALGOL compilers supported a SWITCH data type which contains a list of "designational expressions". A GOTO statement could reference a switch variable and, by providing an index, branch to the desired destination.