PYTHON - DECISION MAKING

Decision making is anticipation of conditions occurring while execution of the program and specifying actions taken according to the conditions.

Decision structures evaluate multiple expressions which produce TRUE or FALSE as outcome. You need to determine which action to take and which statements to execute if outcome is TRUE or FALSE otherwise.

Python programming language assumes any non-zero and non-null values as TRUE, and if it is either zero or null, then it is assumed as FALSE value.

Python programming language provides following types of decision making statements. Click the following links to check their detail.

Statement	Description
if statements	if statementconsists of a boolean expression followed by one or more statements.
if...else statements	if statementcan be followed by an optional else statement, which executes when the boolean expression is FALSE.
nested if statements	You can use one if or else if statement inside another if or else if statement(s).

Let us go through each decision making briefly:

If StatementIf

It is similar to that of other languages. The if statement contains a logical expression using which data is compared and a decision is made based on the result of the comparison.

Syntax


If the boolean expression evaluates to TRUE, then the block of statement(s) inside the if statement is executed. If boolean expression evaluates to FALSE, then the first set of code after the end of the if statement(s) is executed.

Example


When the above code is executed, it produces the following result:


If …else Statement

An else statement can be combined with an if statement. An else statement contains the block of code that executes if the conditional expression in the if statement resolves to 0 or a FALSE value.

The else statement is an optional statement and there could be at most only one else statement following if.

Syntax

The syntax of the if...else statement is:


Example


When the above code is executed, it produces the following result:


The elif Statement

The elif statement allows you to check multiple expressions for TRUE and execute a block of code as soon as one of the conditions evaluates to TRUE.

Similar to the else, the elif statement is optional. However, unlike else, for which there can be at most one statement, there can be an arbitrary number of elif statements following an if.

Syntax


Core Python does not provide switch or case statements as in other languages, but we can use if..elif...statements to simulate switch case as follows:

Example


When the above code is executed, it produces the following result:


Single Statement Suites

If the suite of an if clause consists only of a single line, it may go on the same line as the header statement.

Here is an example of a one-line if clause:


When the above code is executed, it produces the following result:

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