Conditional Statements

Making decisions

Real programs constantly choose between actions: log the user in or show an error, charge full price or apply a discount. The if statement is how Go expresses that choice. The condition is evaluated and if it is true the block runs; otherwise the else block (if present) runs instead.

score := 72
if score >= 90 {
    fmt.Println("A")
} else if score >= 60 {
    fmt.Println("Pass")
} else {
    fmt.Println("Fail")
}

else if and switch

When you have more than two branches, else if chains keep the code linear and easy to read. For matching a single value against many constants, some languages offer a switch or match statement that is cleaner than a long chain.

Truthy and falsy

Go treats certain values as automatically "true" or "false" inside a condition. Zero, empty strings and the null value are usually falsy, while everything else is truthy. Learning these rules avoids subtle bugs.