Control Structures

• In general, Control structures decide the flow of the program execution.

• The most commonly used control structures in python are

• Sequential: control flows through all the statements, in the order of how the code is written.

• Selection: Depends on the condition, control flows to the different statements.

• Iteration: Certain blocks of code(statements) will be executed repeatedly.

Selection Statement:

• In some cases in programming, Our program has to decide whether the following block of codes needs to be executed or not, based on some conditions.

• Such Decision making statements/selection statements decide the direction of the flow of program execution.

• In python, body statements inside the selection statement are indicated by the indentation. The very first unindented line marks the end of the selection statements.

• Decision making statements/selection statements available in Python are

• if (Simple If)

• if-else

• else-if ladder

• Nested if                  

Looping/Iteration Statements:

• Looping statements are used to execute a specific block of code repeatedly based on the test conditions.

• Commonly used looping statements are

• While loop

• For loop

Loop control statements:

• The program flow inside the looping statements is controlled using the loop control statements.

• Commonly used loop control statements are

• Pass

• Break

• Continue

• Break: We can terminate the loop or break away from the loop using the break statement.

• Continue: We can skip the remaining portion of the loop statement and continue with the next iteration using the Continue statement.

• Pass: We can use the pass statement when your code doesn't want to execute anything but to fill a statement syntactically.

          In an upcoming post, we will discuss each control structure.