You’ll often want your program to make decisions and change its behavior based on testing some condition. For example, only print a value if it is greater than 10. Like most languages, MEL has an if control structure:

if ($x > 10) {

	print("It's greater than 10!\n");

	print("Run!!!\n");

}

You can also specify code to run when the condition is not true with the else keyword:

if ($x > 10) {

	print("It's greater than 10!\n");

	print("Run!!!\n");

} else {

	print("It's not above 10.\n");

	print("It's safe... for now.\n");

}

You can specify several alternatives with the else if statement:

if ( $color == "blue" )

	print("Sky\n"); 

else if ( $color == "red" )

	print("Fire\n");

else if ($color == "yellow" )

	print("Sun\n");

else

	print("I give up!\n");