Conditional Execution

In order to write useful programs, we almost always need the ability to check certain conditions and change the behavior of the program accordingly. Conditional statements give us this ability. The simplest form is the if statement:

The expression in parentheses is called the condition. If it is true, then the statements in brackets get executed. If the condition is not true, nothing happens.

The condition can contain any of the comparison operators, sometimes called relational operators:

Although these operations are probably familiar to you, the syntax Java uses is a little different from mathematical symbols like =, \neq and \le. A common error is to use a single = instead of a double ==. Remember that = is the assignment operator, and == is a comparison operator. Also, there is no such thing as =< or =>.

The two sides of a condition operator have to be the same type. You can only compare ints to ints and doubles to doubles. Unfortunately, at this point you can't compare Strings at all! There is a way to compare Strings, but we won't get to it for a couple of chapters.