Computer Science for STEM The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

Glossary Glossary

block.

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A group of consecutive statements with the same indentation.

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body.

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

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boolean expression.

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An expression that is either true or false.

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boolean function.

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A function that returns a boolean value. The only possible values of the bool type are False and True.

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boolean value.

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There are exactly two boolean values: True and False. Boolean values result when a boolean expression is evaluated by the Python interepreter. They have type bool.

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branch.

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

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chained conditional.

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

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comparison operator.

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

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condition.

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

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conditional statement.

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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.

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logical operator.

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

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modulus operator.

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An operator, denoted with a percent sign ( %), that works on integers and yields the remainder when one number is divided by another.

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nesting.

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

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Pseudocode.

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A mix of English and code (in our case, Python) that programmers use to plan out their programs.

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