As you can tell from your work with Calvin Coolidge’s Cool College, once you start including lots of if
statements in a function the code becomes a little cluttered and clunky. Luckily, there are other tools we can use to build control flow.
else
statements allow us to elegantly describe what we want our code to do when certain conditions are not met.
else
statements always appear in conjunction with if
statements. Consider our waking-up example to see how this works:
if weekday: print("wake up at 6:30") else: print("sleep in")
In this way, we can build if statements that execute different code if conditions are or are not met. This prevents us from needing to write if
statements for each possible condition, we can instead write a blanket else
statement for all the times the condition is not met.
Let’s return to our if
statement for our movie streaming platform. Previously, all it did was check if the user’s age was over 13
and if so, print out a message. We can use an else
statement to return a message in the event the user is too young to watch the movie.
if age >= 13: print("Access granted.") else: print("Sorry, you must be 13 or older to watch this movie.")
Instructions
Calvin Coolidge’s Cool College has another request for you. They want you to add an additional check to a previous if
statement. If a student is failing to meet one or both graduation requirements, they want it to print:
"You do not meet the requirements to graduate."
Add an else
statement to the existing if
statement.