Decision Making in C Language: Understanding Conditional Statements

We make decisions in our daily lives, and decision-making is an integral part of life. Similarly, in programming, we need decision-making to control and regulate the execution of our programs or blocks of code. Decisions are based on calculations, conditions, and comparisons.

So far, we have learned that all statements in C programming execute sequentially in the order they are written in the program. However, in programming, situations may occur where we have to change the order of execution of the program statements depending upon specific conditions.

For example, consider a group of numbers a[] = {12, 45, 78, 65, 44, 90, 21, 11, 2, 34, 67, 80}. If we want to print the even numbers from a given array a[], then we need to decide for each element whether it is even or not before printing it. To deal with these kinds of scenarios in C Programming, we need to know about decision-making. C language has various statements for decision making, such as if, if-else, nested if and if-else-if.

One or more conditions require to be tested or evaluated by the program, along with the statements to be executed if the condition is determined to be true, and optionally, other statements to be executed if the condition is determined to be false. This process is known as 'decision making' in programming.

In C programming, programmers state several conditions for evaluation in the program. The statements execute if the condition is true; otherwise, they might not. C programmers need this type of structure to handle different conditions in a program.

  Use of Decision Making in C :

Conditional statements in C, also known as control structures or control statements, allow the program to execute different blocks of code based on conditions.

Why are Conditional statements needed?
Following are the reasons:

Branching: Branching Statements in a C program allow the programmer to control the flow of execution according to the requirement. Branching statements take different paths of execution based on specific conditions.

Control flow: What is meant by control flow? The order in which the C program executes the statements is called control flow. The code in the program runs in order from the first line to the last line, unless the program changes the control flow, such as with conditionals and loops. They allow us to control the order in which statements are executed.

Handling different cases: Conditional statements provide a mechanism to check for specific conditions and execute the corresponding code block. For example, you might want to handle edge cases, errors, or exceptions.

Event-driven programming: In event-driven programming, conditional statements allow you to respond to various user interactions, such as button clicks, by executing specific code based on the events.