Tech Tuesday: Control Structures

Last time in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming we saw that so-called reserved words have special meaning.  They effectively constitute the built-in vocabulary of a programming language.  Now let’s go all the way back to the basic analogy that I used for the overview post: programming is telling a computer what to do, which is very much like telling a person what to do.  

One of the expressive abilities that is required for that are conditionals, as in: if the front door is locked, then go around the house to the back door. In other words, some of the instructions apply only if a certain condition is encountered.  All programming languages have some notion of a conditional statement.  For instance, in Javascript we can say