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If-then-else flow diagram A nested if–then–else flow diagram. In computer science, conditionals (that is, conditional statements, conditional expressions and conditional constructs) are programming language constructs that perform different computations or actions or return different values depending on the value of a Boolean expression, called a condition.
The detailed semantics of "the" ternary operator as well as its syntax differs significantly from language to language. A top level distinction from one language to another is whether the expressions permit side effects (as in most procedural languages) and whether the language provides short-circuit evaluation semantics, whereby only the selected expression is evaluated (most standard ...
The else clause in the above example is linked to the for statement, and not the inner if statement. Both Python's for and while loops support such an else clause, which is executed only if early exit of the loop has not occurred. Some languages support breaking out of nested loops; in theory circles, these are called multi-level breaks.
The IF-THEN-ELSE is the basis of the McCarthy formalism: its usage replaces both primitive recursion and the mu-operator. The earliest Fortran compilers supported the computed GOTO statement for multi-way branching. Early ALGOL compilers supported a SWITCH data type which contains a list of "designational expressions". A GOTO statement could ...
The dangling else is a problem in programming of parser generators in which an optional else clause in an if–then(–else) statement can make nested conditional statements ambiguous. Formally, the reference context-free grammar of the language is ambiguous , meaning there is more than one correct parse tree .
A representative example in Python is: for an item in some_iterable_object : do_something () do_something_else () Where some_iterable_object is either a data collection that supports implicit iteration (like a list of employee's names), or may be an iterator itself.
The meaning of command is highly dependent on context. For example, some authors refer to conditionals as commands [1] while they are called expressions in Python [2] or Bash [3] and statements in Java. [4] Similarly, writing to stdout is done in Bash with the builtin command printf, while it is done with the built-in function print() in Python ...
The example ~/.bash_profile below is compatible with the Bourne shell and gives semantics similar to csh for the ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_login. The [ -r filename] && cmd is a short-circuit evaluation that tests if filename exists and is readable, skipping the part after the && if it is not.