created 11/07/98; revised 11/24/99, 01/22/00, 07/20/02, 05/26/03
Nested
if
and else
statements can be used to choose
between several options.
But, sometimes nested statements
are inconvenient.
This chapter discusses
other ways to choose between
several options.
switch
statement.
Neither of these statements
does anything that can't be done
with if
s and else
s.
But they are useful enough to know about,
and you will need to know them to use
programs written by other programmers.
Neither of these statements are part of 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.