IF and .IF

[Robert Collins]

What is the differenbce between IF and .IF?

I read where both are MASM Directives but I see the .IF used in control flow of the program and that tells me
it is executed at run time but I thought Directives were executed at compile time and were only
interpeted by the assembler or am I not reading the sourse code correctly?

[donkey]

IF is a compiler directive used for conditional compilation of the source, .IF is an intrinsic macro that is used for a conditional branch in a program,it is normally replaced with a cmp/jcc type instruction sequence.

[Robert Collins]

Well, that make sense it was just at the below link that MS says that IF and .IF are directives.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vcmasm/html/vclrf_masm_topicalcross-referencefordirectives.asp