🍃Control Flow

Control flow is used to determine which blocks of code are executed and how many times. Conditional statements and expressions decide whether or not to execute some code and looping ones execute something more than once.

Truthiness

Logical Operators

Unlike most other operators in Zaidlang which are just a special syntax for method calls, the and and or operators are special. This is because they only conditionally evaluate right operand--they short-circuit.

An and ("logical and") expression evaluates the left-hand argument. If it's false, it returns that value. Otherwise it evaluates and returns the right-hand argument.

printftw(false and 1)
printftw(1 and 2)

An or ("logical or") expression is reversed. If the left-hand argument is true, it's returned, otherwise the right-hand argument is evaluated and returned:

printftw(false or 1)
printftw(1 or 2)

Conditional Statements

A conditional statement is a set of commands that executes if a specified condition is true.

If Statement

The simplest conditional statement, if lets you conditionally skip a chunk of code. It looks like this:

if (condition) {
  // Do something
}

This evaluates the parenthesized expression after if. If it's true, then the block after the condition is evaluated. Otherwise it is skipped. The condition can be any expression that evaluates to true or false.

You may also provide an else branch. It will be executed if the condition is false:

if (condition) {
  // Do something
} else {
  // Do something else
}

Looping Statements

A looping statement offers a quick and easy way to do something repeatedly. In this section, we'll introduce the different looping statements available in Zaidlang.

While Statement

A while statement executes its block as long as a specified condition evaluates to true. A while statement looks like the following:

while (condition) {
  // Do something
}

The condition test occurs before the block is executed. If the condition returns true, the block is executed and the condition is tested again. If the condition returns false, execution stops, and control is passed to the statement following while.

Example 1

The following while loop iterates as long as n is less than 3:

n = 0
x = 0

while (n < 3) {
  n = n + 1
  x += n
}

With each iteration, the loop increments n and adds that value to x. Therefore, x and n take on the following values:

• After the first pass: n = 1 and x = 1

• After the second pass: n = 2 and x = 3

• After the third pass: n = 3 and x = 6

After completing the third pass, the condition n < 3 is no longer true, so the loop terminates.

Example 2

Generally you'll want to avoid infinite loops (there are very few cases where an infinite loops are utilized, such as in game development). These are loops where the condition never evaluates to false. The following example will loop forever because the condition is always true:

while (true) {
  printftw("Hello, world!")
}

For Statement

A for loop repeats until a specified condition evaluates to false. The Zaidlang for loop is similar to the C loop for those familiar.

A for statement looks like the following:

for (initializer; condition; increment) {
  // Do something
}

When a for loop executes, the following occurs:

1. The initializing expression is executed. This expression usually initializes one or more loop counters. This expression can declare variables.

2. The condition expression is evaluated. If the value of condition is true, the loop block is executed. If the value of condition is false, the for loop terminates.

3. The block executes.

4. The increment expression is executed.

5. Control returns to step 2 until the condition expression evaluates to false.