Decision Control Structure

Presenter Vinay Gupta

Decisions ! Decisions !

Decision control instruction can be implemented in C using

The if statement The if-else statement The conditional operators.

General form of if statement looks like this:

if(this condition is true) execute this statement. The keyword if tells the compiler that what
follows, is a decision control instruction. The condition is specified using Relational Operators

Expression x==y
x != y x<y x>y x <= y x >= y

Is true if x is equal to y
x is not equal to y x is less than y x is greater than y x is less than or equal to y x is greater than or equal to y

Forms of if
1) if(condition) do this; 2) if(condition) { do this; and this; } 3) if(condition) do this; else do this; 4) if(condition) { do this; and this; } else { do this; and this; }

Forms of if..(contd)
5) if(condition) do this; else { if(condition) do this; else { do this; and this; } } 6) if(condition) { if(condition) do this; else { do this; and this; } } else do this;

Use of Logical Operators

C allows usage of three logical operators:

&& (read as AND) || (read as OR) ! (read as NOT)

The first two are composed of double symbols. Dont use single symbol | and &. These are bitwise operators. The first two operators, && and ||, allow two or more conditions to be combined in an if statement.

Predict the output.

main( ) { int i; printf(Enter value of i: ); scanf(%d, &i); if(i = 5) printf(You entered 5); else printf(You entered something other than 5); }

The Conditional Operator

The conditional operators ? and : are sometimes called ternary operators since they take three arguments. General Form:
expression 1 ? expression 2 : expression 3

Example
int x,y; scanf(%d,&x); y=(x > 5 ? 3 : 4)

The equivalent if statement will be if( x > 5) y = 3; else y = 4;

This statement will store 3 in y if x is greater than 5, otherwise it will store 4 in y.

Note following points

a) It is not necessary to use conditional operators only in arithmetic statements. For Example

(i == 1 ? printf(Hi) : printf(hello));

The conditional operators can be nested as shown below int big , a , b , c;

big = ( a > b ? (a > c ? 3 : 4 ) : ( b > c ? 6 : 8 ) );

The limitation of the conditional operator is that after the ? Or after the : only one C Statement can occur.