Conditionals¶
Learn about if statements in Python so that you can decide whether to do things or not.
Look at each question and see if you can answer it, then check with the answer we’ve given. Do try these out in the The Python REPL.
Remember: understanding is the most imporant thing, don’t move on until you really understand the question and answer.
You’ve already seen a conditional in the last section Loops, do you remember where?
Was it in this line of code?
while v > 0:
Yes, that tests whether the variable v is greater than 0 and while it is it runs the code inside the block that follows that line.
If v = 4 what does this code do?
if v < 5:
print("small")
print(v)
else:
print("large")
print(v)
- It prints small followed by 4.
And if v = 5 what does it do?
- It prints large followed by 5.
If v = 1 what does this code do?
if v == 1:
print("one")
print("end")
- It prints one followed by end.
If v is any other number does it only print end?
- Yes, end is always printed because that line is not inside the body of the if statement.
Why do we use == when comparing variables and numbers?
- A single = means assign a value to a variable, a double == means test whether two expressions are equal. Python uses two different operators to avoid confusion.
So what does this code do?
v = 5
if v = 1:
v*10
- It raises a SyntaxError because we are not allowed to assign a value to a variable in an if statement.
OK, so back to the challenge: how do we produce the even squares of numbers 1 to 20?
- I need to know how to test for an even number.
Good point, you can do that using the remainder or modulus operator: % - this returns the remainder after a divition, e.g. 11 % 2 produces the remainder after dividing by 2.
So 11 divided by 2 has remainder 1, so we would write that in Python like this:
11 % 2 == 1
Yes, so what does the code look like?
This code should do it because even numbers have zero remainder when dividing by two.
for v in range(1, 21): if v*v % 2 == 0: v*v
