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.")