CHAPTER 43 — More Ways to Make Decisions

Nested if and else statements can be used to choose between several options. But, sometimes it is inconvenient to use nested statements. This chapter discusses other statements that choose between several options.

Chapter Topics:

• The conditional operator ?
• The switch statement

Neither of these statements does anything that can't be done with ifs and elses. But they can be useful, and you will need to know them to understand programs written by other programmers.

Some programmers prefer to never use either statement. Also, neither of these statements are used in the AP Computer Science test given to high school students in the US. For them, this entire chapter may be skipped. These statements are not used in the chapters that follow.