Conditional operators

"Hi, Amigo. Today we'll talk about if/else statements."

"Programs would be of little use if they didn't respond to changing external circumstances. A program needs to know how to adapt to circumstances and perform one action in one case and other actions in other cases. In Java, this is achieved using the 'if/else statement' – a special construct that makes it possible to perform different code blocks if a condition is satisfied."

"It consists of three parts: 'condition', 'command 1' and 'command 2'. If the condition is true, then 'command 1' is executed, otherwise 'command 2' is executed. These commands are never both executed. The statement looks more or less like this:"

if (condition)
     command_1;
 else
     command_2;

"How exciting! I think that statement will make programming much more interesting!"

"Yep. Here are a couple of examples for you:"

if (a < b)
     System.out.println("A is less than B");
 else
     System.out.println("B is less than A");

if (a < b)
 { System.out.println("A is less than B"); System.out.println("B is greater than A"); }
 else
 { System.out.println("B is less than A"); System.out.println("A is greater than B"); }

if (a < b)
 { a = 0; }
 else
 { }

if (a < b)
 { a = 0; }

if (a < b)
     a = 0;

"Diego just asked me to give you a few tasks."