6: If

Up to now, all of our programs have executed their instructions in order without skipping any lines. Here's an example; step back and forth through the code with the buttons or your keyboard's arrow keys.

The new ability in this lesson is the if statement, which allows us to perform actions only when certain conditions are met, and skip lines otherwise. For example, let's change our program to output an extra message when someone's age is large enough. We will add two lines: if age > 65: (meaning, "if age is greater than 65") and   print('Enjoy retirement!'). Now step through the code again:

Notice that the new print statement was skipped because age was only 31! What happens with the exact same program when birthYear is changed to 1928?

Do you notice the difference? The bottom version (with age 85) printed out two lines and did not skip any. This is exactly the purpose of the if statement: to check something (is age greater than 65?) and to perform certain actions (printing Enjoy retirement!) only when the check holds true.

We call the thing being checked the condition, and the statements that are dependent on whether the condition holds true the body. The body has to be indented which means there are extra spaces at the start of the line (like in the example above). The body can actually contain more than one statement: to do this, write several indented lines. Here's an example.

  • Try running this code in the console or visualizer with birth year 1982. Both of the indented lines are skipped.

In the next exercise, we ask you to write a short program with boolean comparisons. We already saw in the examples above that "if x > y:" means "if x is greater than y". You might also find the following operations useful:

  • if x < y: means "if x is less than y"
  • if x >= y: means "if x is greater than or equal to y"
  • if x <= y: means "if x is less than or equal to y"

Coding Exercise: IHOPython
Write a program which reads an integer from input using pancakes = int(input()). If pancakes is more than 3, print out Yum! and if pancakes is not more than 3, print out Still hungry! instead. Hint
You may enter input for the program in the box below.

Structure of an If Statement

  • The first line,
    if «condition»:
    has three parts: the word if, the «condition» which must be a True/False expression (more on this below), and a colon :
  • Then, the body consisting of one or more indented lines. The number of spaces (the amount of indentation) doesn't matter, but being inconsistent will cause an error since Python uses the amount of indentation to determine where you mean the body to start or stop.

The body of an if statement is an example of a programming "block". Blocks will be used in many other places later on, including "for loops" and defining your own functions. (Certain other programming languages indicate blocks is with curly braces {}.)

The next exercise is actually 3 exercises in one. You will arrange the lines of a program to get several different results. Click on the horizontal bars to open each part; you can do them in any order. As usual, in each part, drag and drop the lines of code to rearrange them.


Part 1: Unexpected indent
Scramble Exercise: Unexpected Indent
You must cause the following error:

IndentationError: unexpected indent
  • if 1000 < 10:
  • print("message 1")
  • print("message 2")
  • if 2 > 1:
  • print("message 3")
Part 2: Unexpected unindent
Scramble Exercise: Unexpected Unindent
You must cause the following error:

IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level
  • if 1000 < 10:
  • print("message 2")
  • if 2 > 1:
  • print("message 3")
  • print("message 1")
Part 3: Proper indentation
Scramble Exercise: Proper Indentation
Don't cause any errors!
  • if 1000 < 10:
  • print("message 1")
  • print("message 2")
  • if 2 > 1:
  • print("message 3")

True, False, and bool

So far, in the «condition» part of an if statement, we saw a simple numerical comparison x > y, which is true when x is greater than y and false when x is less than or equal to y. More generally, any true/false value is called Boolean (see George Boole). In Python, the bool type is used to represent Boolean values; only two bool values exist, True and False.

Example
Boolean expressions

Note that in Python, when you use the bool values True and False directly in a program, they must be capitalized or you will get an error.

Boolean comparisons

The operators >, <, <=, and >= compare two numbers and give back a bool. There are two other ways to compare numbers:

  • x == y is the equality operator, it returns True if x and y are equal
  • x != y is the not-equal operator, it returns True if x and y are not equal
  • == and != also work for strings and other types of data

(There are two equal signs == here since the single equals sign already has the meaning in x = «expression» of "assign the variable x the value of «expression». Confusing = with == is a common source of bugs.)

Here is an exercise that will involve one of the new comparisons.

Coding Exercise: What's Your Sign?
Write a program that reads an integer from input, then outputs one of the capitalized words Positive, Negative, or Zero according to whether the number is positive, negative, or zero.
You may enter input for the program in the box below.

We just introduced the concept of a block (several lines grouped together at the same indentation level). You can have a block inside another block:

if password=='openSesame':
  print('User logged on.')
  if hour>17:
    print('Good evening!')
  print('Enter a command:')
Here the outer block consists of 4 lines and the inner block consists of just 1 line: 
if password=='openSesame':  
print('User logged on.')
if hour>17:
print('Good evening!')
print('Enter a command:')

Multiple Choice Exercise: Nested ifs
Which of the following outputs is not possible for this program?
Correct! If any messages are shown, it must be the case that the outer (blue) block was executed, or in other words the password was correct. In this case, even if hour>17 is false (and the inner block is skipped), the line print('Enter a command:') of the outer block will still be executed.

Now, you must use nested blocks to write a slightly more complex age calculator.

Coding Exercise: Age checker
Write a program that reads an integer from input, representing someone's age. If the age is 18 or larger, print out You can vote. If the age is between 0 and 17 inclusive, print out Too young to vote. If the age is less than 0, print out You are a time traveller.
You may enter input for the program in the box below.

Later, in lesson 9, we will see that situations involving multiple boolean checks can be simplified using the else and elif (else if) commands as well as the Boolean operators "and", "or", and "not". For now, you are ready to proceed to the next lesson.