Definition and Purpose of Conditionals in C

Definition and Example

A conditional (or a conditional statement) is a decision-making tool that allows us to make a decision based on a specific situation. 

For example, imagine you want to write a program that can tell you whether you should carry an umbrella with you or not (decision) based on the weather condition outside (situation). 

1. First, you check if it’s raining. If that’s the case, you feed this information to your program, and in return the program will respond with “take your umbrella.”
2. If it’s not raining, you check if it’s cloudy. Similar to the first case, you feed this information to your program, and it will respond with the message “You might want to take an umbrella, just in case.”
3. If it’s neither raining nor cloudy, your program will respond with the message “Leave your umbrella at home!”

This simple example demonstrates how powerful a program can become if it leverages the power of conditionals. It can suggest what to do in a specific situation. Depending upon the program you write and the complexity of the program, you can relieve the burden of making complex decisions in life, and rely on your program to make choices for you. 

Other than this advantage, there are a couple of more advantages of using conditionals in your programs. Here are those.

Importance of Conditional Statements

1. They make programs smart:  The greatest advantage of conditionals is that it allows your program to do a specific thing based on a specific situation. This makes your programs more intelligent and useful.
2. They save time:  Instead of writing separate programs for different situations, conditional statements allow you to handle all the situations in the same program. This saves your time and energy.
3. They enhance user interaction:  To increase the interactivity, conditionals are vital. For example, in a game, whether the player has reached the next level can be decided based on the high score he secured. So, conditionals enhance user interaction.

These are some of the advantages of using conditional statements in a program. I hope this motivates you to use conditional statements wherever possible in your programs to make them smarter and more intelligent. But, to do that, we need to familiarize ourselves with the different conditionals available in C and the ways in which we can use them. So, in the next tutorial, we will dive deeper into various conditional statements and how to use them. See you there!