One of the instructions, statements or groups of
statements in a programming language which determines the
sequence of execution of other instructions or statements (the
control flow).
In
assembly language this typically consists of jumps and
conditional jumps along with
procedure call and return
though some architectures include other constructs such as an
instruction which skips the following instruction depending on
some condition (
PDP?), various kinds of
loop instructions
(later
Motorola 680x0) or conditional execution of all
instructions (Advanced RISC Machine).
Basic control structures (whatever their names in particular
languages) include "if CONDITION then EXPRESSION else
EXPRESSION", the
switch statement, "while CONDITION do
EXPRESSION", "gosub", the suspect "
goto" and the much-feared
"
come from". Other constructs handle errors and
exceptions such as traps and
interrupts.