Making Decisions

Making decisions is an common part of writing code, so in this section we will cover functions in Clojure that help us take decisions.

You will be introduced to the following functions for the first time:

• if - make a decision based on some true or false condition
• odd?, even? - test if a value is odd or even and returns true or false (predicates)
• true, false - Boolean values that represent true and false

Is it true or false - the if function

The if function we do something based on whether some condition is either true or false. If the condition is true, then do the first thing. If the condition is false, then do the second thing.

(if condition
  "true - then evaluate and return me"
  "false - then evaluate and return me")

Conditions

A condition can be a simple value, like true or false, or it can be the result of a function call that gives either a true or false value.

Guess which of the following conditions return a true or false value

(= 1 1)
(= "Hello" "Clojure")
(< 3 4)
(> 3 4)
(odd? 3)
(even? 7)

To check your answers, copy / paste a line of the code above into the code box below to see if you are correct.

Am I sleepy

We are going to start with the assumption that you are sleepy, it is a Saturday morning after all. If you are sleepy, then you could get a nice cup of tea or coffee. If you are wide awake then you can start coding.

Assign a name to the true or false value

(def sleepy )

Write an if statement to decide what to do if you are sleepy

(if sleepy )

Change the value of sleepy to see what does the code tell us to do…

See the suggested example