5.1. Conditionals

The most common control structure, in any programming language, is the conditional. This is a way of telling the computer to conditionally execute some code: to execute it only if some condition is satisfied. The condition is an expression—if it evaluates to any value other than false or nil, then the condition is satisfied.

Ruby has a rich vocabulary for expressing conditionals. The syntax choices are described in the subsections that follow. When writing Ruby code, you can choose the one that seems most elegant for the task at hand.