What?! Use Conditional Logic with If Statements

Curriculum Help
1

Tell us what’s happening:
Okay, so I got this to work. It was easy. Stupidly easy BUT, apparently I’m stupid for not knowing WHY it works. And if I move on without someone explaining to me why the hell this works I may go nuts.

So, walking through this. I declared a function gave it a parameter. Then if my parameter is true i get the first return, if false i get the second. Seems simple enough. But where does our function ever tell the thing to check if it is true. All i’m efdectively doing when i run it is giving my parameter a value of either true or false, so i should just be getting back my first line. Computer should see it be like yup, it’s got a value, return his first line.

Shouldn’t it be more like this?

function trueOrFalse(wasThatTrue) {
  if (wasThatTrue = true) {
return "Yes, that was true";
   }
return "No, that was false";
 }

What is my function comparing the argument to in order to give me either return? If I go with the answer they want it doesn’t make sense. What am i missing?

Your code so far

// Example
function ourTrueOrFalse(isItTrue) {
  if (isItTrue) { 
    return "Yes, it's true";
  }
  return "No, it's false";
}

// Setupo
function trueOrFalse(wasThatTrue) {

  // Only change code below this line.
  if (wasThatTrue) {
return "Yes, that was true";
   }
return "No, that was false";
 }
  
  // Only change code above this line.



// Change this value to test
trueOrFalse(true);

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Link to the challenge:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/use-conditional-logic-with-if-statements

2

if statements are always going to treat their conditions as either true or false (actually “truthy” or “falsey”, but that’s for another day). The values true and false are special. They aren’t just the words "true" and "false", but the only two options of a value type called a Boolean. It’s like heads or tails, on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0.

There are expressions that evaluate to true or false, like true === true. Usually you are putting something like this in a conditional. But you can also just take a true or false directly. For this reason, you never have to use === true inside a conditional.

4

Thank you both. Also thank you for the correction on === vs =. I knew there had to be a reason behind why it worked, but couldnt wrap my brain around it. I appreciate your help very much. I feel really dumb when stuff that seems so simple confuses me :frowning:

5

Don’t feel dumb. @camperextraordinaire and I (and others) are here because when people are learning to code, they need to ask questions like this.