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control flow

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Also known as control flow statement, flow of control

order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated

In the Vinony graph

Vinony's link graph records 546 inbound references to control flow, and connects out to program loop, Fortran and Edsger W. Dijkstra.

Vinony files it under Control flow, Iteration in programming and Programming language comparisons.

Vinony links it to 34 Wikipedia language editions.

Wikidata facts

Subclass of
structure
Field of work
computer science
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topic's main category
Category:Control flow
Commons category
Control flow
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Encyclopedic overview

In software, control flow (or flow of control) describes how execution progresses from one command to the next. In many contexts, such as machine code and an imperative programming language, control progresses sequentially (to the command located immediately after the currently executing command) except when a command transfers control to another point – in which case the command is classified as a control flow command. Depending on context, other terms are used instead of command. For example, in machine code, the typical term is instruction and in an imperative language, the typical term is statement.

Although an imperative language encodes control flow explicitly, languages of other programming paradigms are less focused on control flow. A declarative language specifies desired results without prescribing an order of operations. A functional language uses both language constructs and functions to control flow even though they are usually not called control flow statements.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “control flow” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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