Control Structures

if

The if control structure is pretty similar to most programming languages and can be nested as well.

if 4 < 5:
  echo "4 is less than 5"
else:
  echo "4 isn't less than 5"

There is a special keyword elif that is used to check for additional conditionals to be met:

if 4 > 5:
  echo "4 is greater than 5"
elif 4 < 5:
  echo "4 is less than 5"
else:
  echo "Something else is true"

while

case

When you need to match against multiple patterns, you can use a case statement. This is a basic example of the case statement:

let lastName = "Smith"
case lastName
of "":
  echo "You have no last name."
of "Smith":
  echo "Wow, you have a very common last name."
of "Doe":
  echo "Are you missing?"
else:
  echo "What a unique last name,", lastName, "."

We can also check to see if it is in a set of numbers:

let num = 45
case num
of 45..50: 
  echo "The number is in this set: {45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50}."
else:
  echo "The number must be something else."

We can also just list a few numbers as well to check against:

let num = 45
case num
of 45, 50: 
  echo "The number is either 45 or 50."
else:
  echo "The number must be something else."

You must always account for any possible outcomes, otherwise it will not compile. We can just add discard to the else statement if we don’t want to do anything if it doesn’t match anything:

# this example has no output
let num = 335
case num
of 45, 50: 
  echo "The number is either 45 or 50."
else:
  discard

for