Control Statements

Control statements in Drizzle include the following;

• if

• elif

• else

• for

• while

• break

• continue

Before we go into the details, we first need to discuss what Drizzle treats as truthy and falsey.

Truthy / Falsey

A truthy value is a value that translates to true in the case of conditional statements like if and while.

A falsey value is a value that translates to false in the same situations.

A falsey value is anything that is empty or represents nothing, which includes;

• 0

• false

• '' # empty string

• [] # empty list

• () # empty tuple

• {} # empty set or dict (depends on type decl)

• null

A value is truthy if it is not one of the above values.

Conditionals

The simplest conditional is a solitary if statement.

These can be followed by any number of elif (else if) statements, and can also optionally be concluded with an else statement.

The syntax of these is as follows;

if false {
    println('False is a truthy value')
}
elif true {
    println('True is a truthy value')
}
else {
    println('This shouldn\'t really have happened...')
}

The if and elif statements take an expression, which is evaluated to be truthy or falsey. If the expression for the statement evaluates as truthy, the contents of the following block are run. If not, the next elif statement (if any) is run, which also takes an expression. If none of the elif statements' expressions evaluate to a truthy value, the else block (if any) will be run.

Similar to Python, if statements can be used as part of assignment statements, like the following;

let x: int = if false { 3 } else { 4 }  # x == 4

In these situations, they are named conditional expressions instead of statements, due to the difference in definition between a statement and an expression.

Loops

There are two types of looping in Drizzle; for and while.

for loops are used when the number of repetitions are known in advance, e.g. to do something 5 times, you can use the following code;

for i: int in 0...5 {
    println(i)
}

See more on ranges in the Datatypes page.

The same output can be generated from the following;

for i: int in [0, 1, 2, 3, 4] {
    println(i)
}

The output of this will be

0
1
2
3
4

On the other hand, while loops are used when you don't know the amount of repetitions that will need to be done, e.g. when you're reading lines from a file and you don't know how many lines are in the file.

while loops take an expression, and if it evaluates to a truthy value, the block of the loop will be run.

let i: int = 0
while i < 10 {
    i++
}

Break / Continue

There are two loop specific control statements in Drizzle; break and continue.

break when used inside a loop will stop the execution of the loop and continue execution of the program after the block of the loop.

continue when used will stop the execution of the current loop and continue from the next loop.