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JavaScript JavaScript Basics (Retired) Making Decisions with Conditional Statements The Conditional Challenge

Staclin Patterson
Staclin Patterson
4,589 Points
Posted by Staclin Patterson
Staclin Patterson
4,589 Points

Quiz challenge

I did a simple math quiz to make it easy to test. It looked something like this.

var score = 0; var questionOne= prompt('What is 1*0?'); if (questionOne === 0){score +=1}

When I did this the score would not add one when I gave the correct answer. After looking through the forms I changed the conditional statement to: if(questionOne >=0){score +=1}. After doing so my program worked and would add 1 to the score variable after a correct answer was giving.

I'm just wondering why the less than symbol is necessary rather than the equal to operator?

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
229,732 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
229,732 Points

The inequality part of the operator was incidental. The real issue was that the original test was using the "strict" equality comparison ("===") which only matches when the terms are the same type. But the results from "prompt" are a string which was being compared to a number, so that operator would never consider them the same.

The normal equality operator ("=="), and in this case the greater-or-equal operator (">=") do automatic type conversion as needed.