Chapter 18. Programming Your App to Make Decisions: Conditional Blocks
Figure 18-0.
Computers, even small ones like the phone in your pocket, are good at performing millions of operations in a single second. Even more impressively, they can also make decisions based on the data in their memory banks and logic specified by the programmer. This decision-making capability is probably the key ingredient of what people think of as artificial intelligence, and it’s definitely a very important part of creating smart, interesting apps! In this chapter, we’ll explore how to build this decision-making logic into your apps.
Figure 18-1. An event handler that tests for a condition and branches accordingly
Chapter 14 discusses how an app’s behavior is defined by a set of event handlers. Each event handler executes specific functions in response to a particular event. The response need not be a linear sequence of functions, however; you can specify that some functions be performed only under certain conditions. For example, a game app might check if a player’s score has reached 100, or a location-aware app might ask if the phone is within the boundaries of some building. Your app can ask such questions and, depending on the answer, proceed accordingly.
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