Conditionals¶

All programming languages provide constructs to choose code to execute based on some conditions. These constructs are known as conditionals, and Scheme is no exception to this rule. The keywords provided by Scheme are if, cond and case, and they are accompanied by the logical operators/expressions and, or and not.

There is a conceptual difference to conditionals in other languages, though. Colloquially one would phrase the if conditional as “if a certain condition is met then do the following”. In Scheme, however, the conditional is a single expression, and depending on the tested condition this evaluates to one of its subexpressions. We will investigate this closer in the following chapters.