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

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
231,236 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.