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As a beginning programmer, you’ll often hear terms like “control flow”, “conditional statements”, “branching”, and “logic flow”. These concepts which may sound complex at first are at the core of how you can write programs that make decisions and choose different actions based on various conditions.
Learning how to leverage control flow and conditionals allows you to build logic, complexity, and powerful functionality into your code.
Instead of programs that just execute statements line-by-line, you can create intelligent programs that assess situations, decide on courses of action, and respond appropriately just as humans do on a daily basis.
Grasping control flow gives you the reins to guide your program’s path, telling it where to go and what to do in different scenarios. This opens the door to creating all kinds of practical real-world applications.
Read on for a straightforward beginner’s guide to understanding and applying control flow and conditional statements in your own programs!
The Sequential Flow
First, let’s consider a program without any control flow or conditionals:
