Foundations of Python Programming: Functions First

Glossary Glossary

block.

A group of consecutive statements with the same indentation.

body.

The block of statements in a compound statement that follows the header.

boolean values.

A value that is either True or False. True and False must be capitalized to be considered Boolean.

branch.

One of the possible paths of the flow of execution determined by conditional execution.

chained conditional.

A conditional branch with more than two possible flows of execution. In Python chained conditionals are written with if ... elif ... else statements.

comparison operator.

One of the operators that compares two values: ==, !=, >, <, >=, and <=.

condition.

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

conditional statement.

A statement that controls the flow of execution depending on some condition. In Python the keywords if, elif, and else are used for conditional statements.

logical operators.

“and”, “or” and “not” are logical operators used to evaluate expressions. Their semantic meaning is similar to their English meaning.

nesting.

One program structure within another, such as a conditional statement inside a branch of another conditional statement.

unary selection.

A selection statement in which there is only an “if” statement and the “else” statement is omitted entirely. In an unary selection, the statements are only executed if the condition evaluates to true, otherwise the program continues to the body following the if statement.