4.10. Glossary

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.

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