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Glossary

23 February, 2015 - 12:49

body: The sequence of statements within a compound statement.

boolean expression: An expression whose value is either True or False.

branch: One of the alternative sequences of statements in a conditional statement.

chained conditional: A conditional statement with a series of alternative branches.

comparison operator: One of the operators that compares its operands: ==, !=, >, <, >=, and <=.

conditional statement: A statement that controls the flow of execution depending on some condition.

condition: The boolean expression in a conditional statement that determines which branch is executed.

compound statement: A statement that consists of a header and a body. The header ends with a colon (:). The body is indented relative to the header.

guardian pattern: Where we construct a logical expression with additional comparisons to take advantage of the short circuit behavior.

logical operator: One of the operators that combines boolean expressions: and, or, and not.

nested conditional: A conditional statement that appears in one of the branches of another conditional statement.

traceback: A list of the functions that are executing, printed when an exception occurs.

short circuit: When Python is part-way through evaluating a logical expression and stops the evaluation because Python knows the final value for the expression without needing to evaluate the rest of the expression.