The if-else Construct

Introduction

Until now, we have seen that a Go program starts executing in main() and sequentially executes the statements in that function. However, we often want to execute certain statements only if a condition is met, which means we want to make decisions in our code. For this, Go provides the following conditional or branching structures:

• The if-else construct
• The switch-case construct
• The select construct

Repeating one or more statements (a task) can be done with the iterative or looping structure:

• for (range) construct

Some other keywords like break and continue can also alter the behavior of the loop. There is also a return keyword to leave a body of statements and a goto keyword to jump the execution to a label in the code. Go entirely omits the parentheses ( and ) around conditions in if, switch and for-loops, creating less visual clutter than in Java, C++ or C#.

The if-else Construct