Practical Data Wrangling

Compound statement syntax and indentation level

A compound statement consists of two parts. The first part, the clause header, is a line containing the type of statement and some other information specific to the statement. The clause header always starts with the type of clause and ends with a colon. The following is the syntax of a clause header:

<clause type> <clause body>:

(Note that this figure and the next two are just to demonstrate the syntactical structure and do not represent functional code).

The second part is called the suite in the documentation, but it is also called a code block, which is the term I will use in this book. The code block is a series of additional statements that are controlled by the compound statement. Each ...