# The initial statement of an if block

An `if` conditional can have an "initial" statement. The variable(s) created in the initial statement are *only* defined within the scope of the `if` body.

```go
if INITIAL_STATEMENT; CONDITION {
}
```

## Why would I use this?

This is just some syntactic sugar that Go offers to shorten up code in some cases. For example, instead of writing:

```go
length := getLength(email)
if length < 1 {
    fmt.Println("Email is invalid")
}
```

We can do:

```go
if length := getLength(email); length < 1 {
    fmt.Println("Email is invalid")
}
```

Not only is this code a bit shorter, but it also removes `length` from the parent scope, which is convenient because we don't need it there - we only need access to it while checking a condition.