control structure

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Control structures

Programs written in procedural languages, the most common kind, are like recipes, having lists of ingredients and step-by-step instructions for using them. The three basic control structures in virtually every procedural language are:

• 1. Sequence—combine the liquid ingredients, and next add the dry ones.
• 2. Conditional—if the tomatoes are fresh then simmer them, but if canned, skip this step.
• 3. Iterative—beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks.

Sequence is the default control structure; instructions are executed one after another. They might, for example, carry out a series of arithmetic operations, assigning results to variables, to find the roots of a quadratic equation ax² + bx + c = 0. The conditional IF-THEN or IF-THEN-ELSE control structure allows a program to follow alternative paths of execution. Iteration, or looping,

Introduction to the Programming

Computer programming (often shortened to programming) is the comprehensive process that leads from an original formulation of a computing problem to executable programs. It involves activities such as analysis, understanding, and generically solving such problems resulting in an algorithm, verification of requirements of the algorithm including its correctness and its resource consumption, implementation (or coding) of the algorithm in a target programming language, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code, implementation of the build system and management of derived artefacts such as machine code of computer programs. The algorithm is often only represented in human-parseable form and reasoned about using logic. Source code is written in one or more programming languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, Smalltalk, Javascript,etc.). The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate performing a specific task or solve a given problem. The process of programming thus often requires expertise in many different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms and formal logic.