The statements inside your source files are generally executed from top to bottom, in the order that they appear. Control flow statements, however, break up the flow of execution by employing decision making, looping, and branching, enabling your program to conditionally execute particular blocks of code. This section describes the decision-making statements (if-then, if-then-else, switch), the looping statements (for, while, do-while), and the branching statements (break, continue, return) supported by the Java programming language.