Conditionals

Let's take a look at an if/else statement written in two ways in both Python and JavaScript:

Python	JavaScript
if a < b: min = a else: min = b	let min if (a < b) { min = a } else { min = b }
min = a if a < b else b	let min = (a < b) ? a : b

In both columns, the code is doing the same thing: a simple test to see whether a is less than b and then assigning the smaller value to the min variable. The first row is a full if/else statement and the second row uses the ternary structure. There are a few grammar rules to note in these examples:

• min must be declared before use, as a best practice. In strict mode, this would actually throw an error.
• Our if clause is encapsulated with parentheses.
• Our if/else statements are encapsulated with curly braces.
• The keywords and operators in the ternary are significantly different (and a bit more cryptic) than in Python.

If we wanted to use what we now know about typeof, we can use strict...