Conditional statements and program coding: an experimental evaluation

Prior research supports the superiority of the nested conditional over the branch-to-label conditional. However, when examining programmer performance using these two forms of the conditional, the prior research has confounded several programming tasks. If these tasks are disentangled and programmers are trained to perform the tasks using language-independent paradigms, the relative performance of the nested conditional versus the branch-to-label conditional is no longer clear-cut.