Control flow
order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated
In software, control flow (or flow of control) describes how execution progresses from one command to the next. In many contexts, such as machine code and an imperative programming language, control progresses sequentially (to the command located immediately after the currently executing command) except when a command transfers control to another point – in which case the command is classified as a control flow command. Depending on context, other terms are used instead of command. For example, in machine code, the typical term is instruction and in an imperative language, the typical term is statement.
Although an imperative language encodes control flow explicitly, languages of other programming paradigms are less focused on control flow. A declarative language specifies desired results without prescribing an order of operations. A functional language uses both language constructs and functions to control flow even though they are usually not called control flow statements.
For a central processing unit instruction set, a control flow instruction often alters the program counter and is either an unconditional branch (a.k.a. jump) or a conditional branch. An alternative approach is predication which conditionally enables instructions instead of branching.
“Control flow” enters the record as order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Control, flow and order can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q868299. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Control flow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.