Loop, switch, or take a break? Deciding and iterating with Java statements

Java applications evaluate expressions in the context of statements, which are used for tasks such as declaring a variable, making a decision, or iterating over statements. A statement can be expressed as a simple or a compound statement:

• A simple statement is a single standalone instruction for performing a task; it must be terminated with a semicolon character (;).
• A compound statement is a sequence of simple and other compound statements located between open- and close-brace characters ({ and }), which delimit the compound statement’s boundaries. Compound statements can be empty, will appear wherever simple statements appear, and are alternatively known as blocks. A compound statement is not terminated with a semicolon.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use statements in your Java programs. You can use statements such as if, if-else, switch, for, and while to declare variables and specify expressions, make decisions, iterate (or loop) over statements, break and continue iteration, and more. I’ll leave some of the more exotic statements–such as statements for returning values from called methods and for throwing exceptions–for future Java 101 tutorials.

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