Hi, I’m repliicated and I am confused on something about if statements. Sometimes, when I look at code examples, I see this:
if condition then
print("something")
end
To make it clear, it just says something, like condition in this case. I don’t understand why, so could someone make it clear? Thanks.
Is it something like if the condition is true then do something?
Yes, if condition is not nil or false then it will print “something”
The condition, in any way possible has to evaluate to true for the if-statement to run. Meaning you can either just leave it as condition or condition == true. For checking if it’s false or nil, you can simply do not condition or condition == false. In both of these, the former is more concise so you’ll see more uses of that.
From the Lua 5.1 docs:
Boolean is the type of the values false and true . Both nil and false make a condition false; any other value makes it true.
So any value can be used as a boolean/condition. In situations where something acts as e.g. a condition in an if statement or while loop, the value is treated as true or false as described above.