SELECT CASE

A conditional branching structure to allow definition of multiple different actions to be taken according to the value of an expression or variable

Implemented by: sbasic, ansifull, bwbasic, bw32, QBasic, VBDOS, FreeBASIC, ugBASIC, EndBASIC

With variations: Gambas

Also written as:

SELECT-CASE is not by itself a BASIC keyword, but the most popular name of a multibranch structure which substitutes a possibly long sequence of IFs and ELSEs.

SELECT-CASE is more often found in structured, not numbered-line versions of BASIC, but it might be found in line-numbered BASICs as well. The ANSI Full specification has some examples, such as:

10 SELECT CASE X
20 CASE IS < 0
30    PRINT X; "is negative"
40 CASE IS > 0
50    PRINT X; "is positive"
60 CASE ELSE
70    PRINT X; "is zero"
80 END SELECT

• CASE
• ELSE
• ENDSELECT, END SELECT and ENDCASE

• CASE
• IF, ELSE, ELSEIF

The SELECT-CASE structure is very similar to the switch…case structure found in C and descendents such as PHP, Java, Javascript. Tcl also has a switch command which dispenses the case keyword and basically works with string comparison only.

Python had to wait until version 3.10.6 to have a similar structure, match…case.