C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 7 Program Control Statements

What’s in This Chapter

• The if-else and switch statements
• The ?: and ?? operators
• The for, while, do, and foreach loops
• Enumerators
• The break and continue statements

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Program control statements tell an application which other statements to execute under different circumstances. They control the path that execution takes through the code. They include commands that tell the program to execute some statements but not others and to execute certain statements repeatedly.

The two main categories of control statements are decision statements (or conditional statements) and looping statements. The following sections describe in detail the decision and looping statements provided by C#.

Decision Statements

A decisions statement or conditional statement represents a branch in the program. It marks a place where the program can execute one set of statements or another, or possibly no statements at all, depending on some condition. These include several kinds of if statements and switch statements.

if-else Statements

The if-else statement has the following syntax:

if (condition1) statement1;
else if (condition2) statement2;
else if (condition3) statement3;
...
else statementElse;

The conditions are logical expressions ...