Conditional execution

Se 113 – Introduction To Programming

Sections 3 & 4

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tarık Kışla

Contents

 Boolean expressions
 Logical operators
 Conditional execution
 Alternative execution
 Chained conditionals
 Nested conditionals
 Catching exceptions using try and except
 Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions
 Exercises
Boolean expressions

 A boolean expression is an expression that is either true or false.

 The following examples use the operator ==,
 which compares two operands and produces True if they are equal and False otherwise:
 >>> 5 == 5 True
>>> 5 == 6 False
Boolean expressions

 True and False are special values that belong to the class bool; they are not strings:
 >>> type(True)
<class 'bool'>
 >>> type(False)
<class 'bool'>
Boolean expressions

 the other comparison operators are:

 x != y # x is not equal to y
 x>y # x is greater than y
 x<y # x is less than y
 x >= y # x is greater than or equal to y
 x <= y # x is less than or equal to y
 x is y # x is the same as y
 x is not y # x is not the same as y
Boolean expressions

 Although these operations are probably familiar to you, the Python symbols are different from the
mathematical symbols for the same operations.
 A common error is to use a single equal sign (=) instead of a double equal sign (==).
 Remember that = is an assignment operator and == is a comparison operator.
 There is no such thing as =< or =>.
Logical operators

 There are three logical operators: and, or, and not.

 The semantics (meaning) of these operators is similar to their meaning in English.
 For example,
 x > 0 and x < 10
 is true only if x is greater than 0 and less than 10.
 Another example
 n%2 == 0 or n%3 == 0
 is true if either of the conditions is true, that is, if the number is divisible by 2 or 3.
Logical operators

 Finally, the not operator negates a boolean expression,

 so not (x > y) is true if x > y is false; that is, if x is less than or equal to y.
Logical operators

 The operands of the logical operators should be boolean expressions, but Python is not very strict.
 Any nonzero number is interpreted as “true.”
 >>> 17 and True
True

This flexibility can be useful, but there are some situation to it that
might be confusing.
Conditional execution

 In order to write useful programs, we almost always need the ability to check conditions and change the
behavior of the program accordingly.
 Conditional statements give us this ability. The simplest form is the if statement:

The boolean expression after the if statement is called the condition.

We end the if statement with a colon character (:) and the line(s) after the if
statement are indented.
Conditional execution

 If the logical condition is true, then the indented statement gets executed.
 If the logical condition is false, the indented statement is skipped.
 if statements have the same structure as function definitions or for loops.
 The statement consists of a header line that ends with the colon character (:) followed by an indented block.
 Statements like this are called compound statements because they stretch across more than one line.
 There is no limit on the number of statements that can appear in the body, but there must be at least one.
 It is useful to have a body with no statements. In that case, you can use the pass statement, which does
nothing.
Conditional execution

 If you enter an if statement in the Python interpreter, the prompt will change from three chevrons to three
dots to indicate you are in the middle of a block of statements, as shown below:
Alternative execution

 A second form of the if statement is alternative execution, in which there are two possibilities and the
condition determines which one gets executed.
 The syntax looks like this:

If the remainder when x is divided by 2 is 0, then we know that x is even, and the
program displays a message to that effect.
If the condition is false, the second set of statements is executed

Since the condition must either be true or false, exactly one of the alternatives will
be executed. The alternatives are called branches, because they are branches in the
flow of execution
Chained conditionals

 Sometimes there are more than two possibilities and we need more than two branches.
 One way to express a computation like that is a chained conditional:

 elif is an abbreviation of “else if.” Again, exactly one branch will be executed.
Chained conditionals

 There is no limit on the number of elif statements. If there is an else clause, it has to be at the end, but there
doesn’t have to be one.

Each condition is checked in order. If the first is false, the next is

checked, and so on.
If one of them is true, the corresponding branch executes, and the
statement ends.
Even if more than one condition is true, only the first true branch
execute
 Nested conditionals

 One conditional can also be nested within another.

 We could have written the three-branch example like this

The outer conditional contains two branches.

The first branch contains a simple statement.
The second branch contains another if statement, which has two branches of its own.
Those two branches are both simple statements, although they could have been conditional
statements as well
Nested conditionals

 Although the indentation of the statements makes the structure apparent, nested conditionals become
difficult to read very quickly. In general, it is a good idea to avoid them when you can.
 Logical operators often provide a way to simplify nested conditional statements.
 For example, we can rewrite the following code using a single conditional
Catching exceptions using try and except

 Earlier we saw a code segment where we used the input and int functions to read and parse an integer
number entered by the user.
 We also saw how danger doing this could be:
Catching exceptions using try and except

 When we are executing these statements in the Python interpreter, we get a new prompt from the interpreter,
think “oops”, and move on to our next statement.
 However if you place this code in a Python script and this error occurs, your script immediately stops in its
tracks with a traceback.
 It does not execute the following statement.
Catching exceptions using try and except

 Here is a sample program to convert a Fahrenheit temperature to a Celsius temperature:

 If we execute this code and give it invalid input, it simply fails with an unfriendly error message:
Catching exceptions using try and except

 There is a conditional execution structure built into Python to handle these types of expected and unexpected
errors called “try / except”.
 The idea of try and except is that you know that some sequence of instruction(s) may have a problem and
you want to add some statements to be executed if an error occurs.
 These extra statements (the except block) are ignored if there is no error.
Catching exceptions using try and except

 You can think of the try and except feature in Python as an “insurance policy” on a sequence of statements.
 We can rewrite our temperature converter as follows:
Catching exceptions using try and except

 Python starts by executing the sequence of statements in the try block.

 If all goes well, it skips the except block and proceeds.
 If an exception occurs in the try block, Python jumps out of the try block and executes the sequence of
statements in the except block.

Handling an exception with a try statement is called catching an exception.

In this example, the except clause prints an error message.
In general, catching an exception gives you a chance to fix the problem, or try again, or at
least end the program gracefully
Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions

 When Python is processing a logical expression such as x >= 2 and (x/y) > 2, it evaluates the expression
from left to right.
 Because of the definition of and, if x is less than 2, the expression x >= 2 is False and so the whole
expression is False regardless of whether (x/y) > 2 evaluates to True or False.
Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions

 When Python detects that there is nothing to be gained by evaluating the rest of a logical expression, it stops
its evaluation and does not do the computations in the rest of the logical expression.
 When the evaluation of a logical expression stops because the overall value is already known, it is called
short-circuiting the evaluation.
Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions

 While this may seem like a fine point, the short-circuit behavior leads to a clever technique called the
guardian pattern.
 Consider the following code sequence in the Python interpreter:

The third calculation failed because Python was evaluating (x/y) and
y was zero, which causes a runtime error.
But the first and the second examples did not fail because in the first
calculation y was non zero and in the second one the first part of
these expressions x >= 2 evaluated to False so the (x/y) was not ever
executed due to the short-circuit rule and there was no error.
Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions

 We can construct the logical expression to strategically place a guard evaluation just before the evaluation
that might cause an error as follows:

In the first logical expression, x >= 2 is False so the evaluation stops at

the and. In the second logical expression, x >= 2 is True but y != 0 is
False so we never reach (x/y).

In the third logical expression, the y != 0 is after the (x/y) calculation so

the expression fails with an error.

In the second expression, we say that y != 0 acts as a guard to insure that

we only execute (x/y) if y is non-zero
Exercises

 Exercise 1:
 Please calculate payment using hours and hourly rate.
 Calculate payment using 1.5 times the hourly rate if employee worked above 40 hours.
Exercises

 Exercise 2:
 Rewrite your pay program using try and except so that your program handles non-numeric input gracefully by
printing a message and exiting the program.
 The following shows two executions of the program:
Exercises

 Write a program to prompt for a score between 0.0 and 1.0. If the score is out of range, print an error
message. If the score is between 0.0 and 1.0, print a grade using the following table:
Thank you for listening…