Control flow

In computer science, control flow (or alternatively, flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an imperative programming language from a declarative programming language.

Within an imperative programming language, a control flow statement is a statement whose execution results in a choice being made as to which of two or more paths should be followed. For non-strict functional languages, functions and language constructs exist to achieve the same result, but they are not necessarily called control flow statements.

A set of statements is in turn generally structured as a block, which in addition to grouping also defines a lexical scope.

Interrupts and signals are low-level mechanisms that can alter the flow of control in a way similar to a subroutine, but usually occur as a response to some external stimulus or event (that can occur asynchronously), rather than execution of an 'in-line' control flow statement.

At the level of machine or assembly language, control flow instructions usually work by altering the program counter. For some CPUs the only control flow instructions available are conditional or unconditional branch instructions (also called jumps).

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