How to Write this if statement?

[PeterFeng]

5X2 table:
M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5
MC1|MC2|MC3|MC4|MC5

I've been thinking for the past 2 hrs. I thought of this, please correct me if i'm wrong;

mc1 will compare with m1, m2, m3, m4, m5. If none of m1-m5 is bigger than mc1, then mc1 will be put aside into a variable call ma (memory unallocated)

ignore compareMem1-5 for now. I'm using it to compare which has the largest difference among all of them.

if(MC1<M1)
{
 compareMem1=M1-MC1;
}
if(MC1<M2)
{
 compareMem2=M2-MC1;
}
if(MC1<M3)
{
 compareMem3=M3-MC1;
}
if(MC1<M4)
{
 compareMem4=M4-MC1;
}
if(MC1<M5)
{
 compareMem5=M5-MC1;
}
else
{
 MC1=MA1;
}

[Nicholas Jordan]

I am still not up to needed skills on this but ( hoping a few comments help ) I bought a two volume set "Algorithms in Java" by Robert Sedgewick, the work is reamarkably well written for understanding and plain language. What you are doing resolves to "Trees" - a common computer science concept. The way you are going about it needs a return statement on each conditional + can be re-thought as putting the values in an array or collection, then writing a for( ; ; ) construct, which as I remember will accept a break; on condition true / false.....many computer science issues here, directed acyclic graph == no shortage of nomenclature or previous work available from the college professors.

Try the aussie's first, they seem to be better at computer science than anything else I have found.