Introduction

Anyone with any programming experience should be familiar with the if…else statement. Basically, it creates a logical branch by examining a particular condition. When the condition is evaluated to be true, the program will execute the operations in the if clause, otherwise executing those in the else clause. Notably, the code in these two clauses will be mutually exclusive, which means that when the code in the if clause gets executed, the code in the else clause will be skipped altogether and vice versa.

Between different languages, there are variations in syntactical details. For example, Kotlin requires that you use parentheses for the condition evaluations, while parentheses are optional in Swift and Python. Both Kotlin and Swift use curly braces for each if and else clauses, but Python uses colons and indentations to denote the scope. Other languages have some other variances, but nothing is surprising to tech-savvy outsiders who are not experts in these particular languages.

In most of these languages, the if and else clauses only exist in the if…elsestatement, and they don’t appear anywhere else in the language. However, Python is unusual in this regard, because there are three other usages of the else clauses.

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