Conditional statements

• To avoid exceptions and increase performance by skipping unnecessary comparisons, use the conditional-AND operator ("&&") instead of the &-operator, and the conditional-OR operator ("||") instead of the |-operator. This will avoid unnecessary evaluations (also known as short-circuit evaluation).

• In a conditional-AND statement, the condition that is most likely to fail should be put first. In a conditional-OR statement, the condition that is most likely to succeed should be put first.

• In selection statements (i.e. if-else and in some cases switch statements) the data distribution should be kept in mind. For example, when implementing a switch statement with three possible cases, e.g. A, B and C, while it is known that C will occur most of the time, performance can be optimized by first checking for C.