Conditionals in

About Conditionals

Comparison operators

Comparison operators in Julia are similar to many other languages, though with some extra options for math-lovers.

For equality, the operators are == (equal) and != or ≠ (not equal).

txt = "abc"
txt == "abc"  # true
txt != "abc"  # false
txt ≠ "abc"  # false (synonym for !=)

In addition, we have the various greater/less than operators.

1 < 3  # true
3 > 3  # false
3 <= 3  # true
3 ≤ 3  # true (synonym for <=)
4 >= 3  # true
4 ≥ 3  # true (synonym for >=)

As often with Julia, an appropriate editor makes use of the mathematical symbol easy. Type \ne, \le or \ge then TAB to get ≠, ≤ or ≥.

The previous example uses only numbers, but we will see in other parts of the syllabus that various additional types have a sense of ordering and can be tested for greater/less than.

Comparison operators can be chained, which allows a clear and concise syntax:

n = 3
1 ≤ n ≤ 5  # true (n "between" two limits)

The previous example is a synonym for 1 ≤ n && n ≤ 5.

Branching with if

This is the full form of an if statement:

if conditional1
    statements...
elseif conditional2
    statements...
else
    statements...
end

There is no need for parentheses () or braces {}, and indentation is "only" to improve readability (but readability is very important!).

Both elseif and else are optional, and there can be multiple elseif blocks. However, the end is required.

It is possible to nest if statements, though you might want to help readability with the thoughtful use of parentheses, indents and comments.

The shortest form of an if statement would be something like this:

if n < 0
    n = 0
end

As a reminder: only expressions that evaluate to true or false can be used as conditionals. Julia deliberately avoids any concept of "truthiness", so zero values, empty strings and empty arrays are not equivalent to false.

Ternary operator

A simple and common situation is picking one of two values based on a conditional.

Julia, like many languages, has a ternary operator to make this more concise.

The syntax is conditional ? value_if_true : value_if_false.

So the previous example could be rewritten:

n = n < 0 ? 0 : n

Parentheses are not required by the compiler, but may improve readability.

Does Julia have a match statement?

No match/case structure is currently part of the base language.

For simple cases, use of if..elseif..else is recommended.

For sophisticated pattern matching, similar to Scala, the Match.jl package is popular. However, as with most third-party packages, Match is not available in the Exercism test runner.