Is it worse when you use a bunch of If's rather than using ElseIf's?

[stevey]

In my program i have a lot of conditions and therefore use a lot of If statements. I sorta have a habit of enjoying the way a short if statement can be, like this:

If $i = 1 Then $text = "hello"

If $i = 2 Then $text = "bye"

And I was wondering if having a lot of those.. would be worse than something like:

If $i = 1 Then

$text = "hello"

ElseIf $i = 2 Then

$text = "bye"

EndIf

I was wondering which is a better programming habit, and why? Or does it not even effect the program at all?

[The Kandie Man]

The second way is better. It is more efficient to use ElseIf, Select Case, and Switches than you use a bunch of If statements. The reason for this is program speed and efficiency. The computer will stop processing the statement as soon as it finds that an ElseIf statement is true. It will then process that and then jump to the next line that follows the Endif without even looking at the Elseif statements that follow the first one that is true. The same is true for Select Case and Switches.

In addition, you generally want to program If Elseif, Select Case, and Switch statements so that the most common result is the first possible match. This prevents the computer from having to do unnecessary logic computations until it reaches the very end of the statement where it finds it to be true.

I hope this answered your question.

[Uten]

And to make sure you should do some profiling of some test code.

When I did some time ago I found Select Case and Switch to be a whole lot slower than If..ElseIf.

This could have changed by now as the dev's seems to be optimizing the engine code when they encounter interesting areas or known bottle necks.

Apart from that If...ElseIf should be faster as @The_Kandie_Man pointed out.