A simple question about bad coding

Question

Hi, to cut a long story short i am coding a small section that changes the colour of a panel depending on the hour of the day, however i don't want to write 24 if statements to check what the hour is, now i have been coding all day and am having a bit of a mental block....can anybody think of another solution?
If not, would it be bad practice to have 24 if statements in a method to check such a trivial attribute?
Thanks for your help in advance

Answer 1

It depends on if there's a nice relationship between the condition and what is to be done depending on the condition. For instance, it would be bad to do this:
int y;
if (x == 0)
  y = 5;
else if (x == 1)
  y = 10;
else if (x == 2)
  y = 15;
// etcbecause obviously there's a simple relationship: y = 5 * (x + 1)
I imagine in your case you could at least stick 24 values (colors or whatever) in an array, and simply index into that array, if there isn't a simple relationship like the above.