The IF ... THEN ... ELSE ... connective appears as the simplest form of CASE operator of recursion theory and computation theory and is the connective responsible for conditional goto's (jumps, branches). From this one connective all other connectives can be constructed (see more below). Although " IF c THEN b ELSE a " sounds like an implication it is, in its most reduced form, a switch that makes a decision and offers as outcome only one of two alternatives "a" or "b" (hence the name switch statement in the C programming language).