Although computers are good at dealing with all kinds of information, two very important values are the values true and false. These are the values returned by a computer when you ask it a question about information it is processing.

What types of questions can you ask it? How about questions that involve asking how two numbers compare. For example, is this question 3 < 10 true or false? What about 56 >= 56? 9 == 9?

For this lesson, you'll use the comparison operators, such as > (greater than) < (less than), <= (less than or equal), and/or >= (greater than or equal). There is also == which means "check if equal." The single = sign is not used for comparison, since it's used for assigning values to variables, as shown in this lesson.

In math, these operators are written as $<$, $>$, $\le$, $\ge$, and $==$. These are all called "comparison operators," since they compare numbers. The results of such comparisons is either true or false. Let's see how they work.

Move the mouse over a dotted box for more information.

In this lesson, use the print statement to display the result of these operators. Try these: print(1 < 5)
print(1 > 50)
print(10 == 10)
print(9 == 15)
print(102 <= 102)
print(3.27 >= 3)
print(5 ~= 3)