Conditional Statements in Julia

Now that we’ve covered looping, we can repeat whatever we do. Thus, today we cover conditionals, so as to be able to choose when we do it.

If construct

We all know this, so let’s jump into code:

julia> x=1;y=2;z=3;if x<y
       println("first")
       elseif y<z
       println("second")
       else
       println("default")
       end

Just a reminder, the indentation is immaterial. And again, as per usual, elseif and else blocks are optional.

Ternary operator

We can write an if loop in one-line as:

julia> x==y ? println("ok") : println("no")

Alas, that’s too tedious, because its Julia we’re in, we can do a more succinct version:

julia> println(x==y ? "equal" : "unequal")

And of course you can chain ternary operators.

julia> println(x<y ? "x" : y<z ? "y" : "z")#Finding the least valued variable

And that’s it for today! Next up, we discuss a truly distinguishing feature of Julia, the way it deals with arrays.

References

1. Julia Docs