Conditional branching: if, '?'

 

Conditional branching refers to the concept of executing certain instructions based on a condition being met. In many programming languages, the "if" statement is used to implement conditional branching.

The syntax of the "if" statement generally follows this pattern:

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if (condition) {
  // code to execute if condition is true
}

For example, in JavaScript:

javascript

let num = 10;

if (num > 5) {
  console.log("The number is greater than 5");
}

In this example, if the condition num > 5 is true (which it is, since num is equal to 10), the code inside the curly braces will be executed and the message "The number is greater than 5" will be printed to the console.

The "?" operator is another way to implement conditional branching in some programming languages. It is also known as the ternary operator, since it takes three operands: a condition, a value to return if the condition is true, and a value to return if the condition is false.

The syntax of the "?" operator generally follows this pattern:

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condition ? value_if_true : value_if_false;

For example, in JavaScript:

javascript

let num = 10;

let message = (num > 5) ? "The number is greater than 5" : "The number is less than or equal to 5";

console.log(message);

In this example, the condition num > 5 is true, so the value of message will be set to "The number is greater than 5". The "?" operator is a shorthand way to write a simple if-else statement, and can be useful in cases where you need to assign a value to a variable based on a condition.