Hour 6. Managing Program Flow with Visual Basic s Control Structures

Hour 6. Managing Program Flow with Visual Basic's Control Structures

In this hour, we will cover

• Using conditional statements

• Identifying the types of looping constructs Visual Basic supports

• Using For loops

• Using Do loops

• Understanding the differences between subroutines and functions

• Using subroutines and functions

In the preceding hour we looked at variables and operators in Visual Basic, two important concepts in any programming language. In this hour we will examine an equally important aspect of all programming languages: control structures.

Control structures are constructs that alter the control flow during a program's execution. Without control structures, programs are executed by running the first line of code, then the second, and so on, where each line of code is executed precisely once in the order in which it appears.

Control structures, however, alter the order of instruction execution and can allow for a group of instructions to execute more than once. The control structures that we'll be examining in this hour are conditionals, loops, subroutines, and functions.