short-circuiting say we are writing program that searches list of words for those whose fifth character is 'zwe might try the followingfor in wordsif [ ]=' 'print(wbut with thiswe will occasionally get string index out of range error the problem is that some words in the list might be less than five characters long the following if statementhoweverwill workif len( )>= and [ ]=' 'it might seem like we would still get an error because we are still checking [ ]but there is no error the key to why this works is short-circuiting python starts by checking the first part of the conditionlen( )>= if that condition turns out to be falsethen the whole and condition is guaranteed to be falseand so there is no point in even looking at the second condition so python doesn' bother with the second condition you can rely on this behavior short-circuiting also happens with or conditions in this casepython checks the first part of the or and if it is truethen the whole or is guaranteed to be trueand so python will not bother checking the second part of the or continuation sometimes you'll write long line of code that would be more readable if it were split across two lines to do thisuse backslash character at the end of the line to indicate that the statement continues onto the next line here is an exampleif ' in string or ' in string or ' in string or ' in string or ' in stringmake sure there are no extra spaces after the backslash or you will get an error message if you are entering listdictionaryor the arguments of functionthe backslash can be left outl 'joe ''bob ''sue ''jimmy ''todd ''frank ''mike ''john ''amy ''edgar ''sam ' pass the pass statement does nothing believe it or notsuch thing does have few uses that we will see later