The pass Statement

The pass statement does nothing. Sometimes we need a placeholder to fill the syntactic requirements of a compound statement. We use the pass statement to fill in the required suite of statements.

The syntax is trivial.

pass

Here's an example of using the pass statement.

if n%2 == 0:
    pass # Ignore even values
else:
    count += 1 # Count the odd values

Yes, technically, we can invert the logic in the if-clause. However, sometimes it is more clear to provide the explicit "do nothing" than to determine the inverse of the condition in the if statement.

As programs grow and evolve, having a pass statement can be a handy reminder of places where a program can be expanded.