body: The sequence of statements within a compound statement.
boolean expression: An expression whose value is either True or False.
branch: One of the alternative sequences of statements in a conditional statement.
chained conditional: A conditional statement with a series of alternative branches.
comparison operator: One of the operators that compares its operands: ==, !=, >, <, >=, and <=.
conditional statement: A statement that controls the flow of execution depending on some condition.
condition: The boolean expression in a conditional statement that determines which branch is executed.
compound statement: A statement that consists of a header and a body. The header ends with a colon (
. The body is indented relative to the header.
guardian pattern: Where we construct a logical expression with additional comparisons to take advantage of the short-circuit behavior.
logical operator: One of the operators that combines boolean expressions: and, or, and not.
nested conditional: A conditional statement that appears in one of the branches of another conditional statement.
traceback: A list of the functions that are executing, printed when an exception occurs.
short circuit: When Python is part-way through evaluating a logical expression and stops the evaluation because Python knows the final value for the expression without needing to evaluate the rest of the expression.