Erlang provides an 'if' expression as syntactic sugar for 'case' (switch), which must always have a true (else) clause. The 'if' form is strongly deprecated. E

Erlang provides an 'if' expression as syntactic sugar for 'case' (switch), which must always have a true (else) clause. The 'if' form is strongly deprecated. Even the 'case' expression is mildly deprecated in favor of pattern matching and guards in function heads (definitions). There are no null values, no classes and no inheritance, but the presence of atoms (arbitrary tokens that can be used like null, true, false or enumerations), and pattern matching (data polymorphism and destructuring), means that conditional execution is elegantly implemented by functions. This is the second, often forgotten, meaning of functional programming. Providing functions as first-class types, supporting anonymous lambdas (closures), and applying functions over collections are given all the glory, but deprecating conditionals in favor of pattern matching over many fine-grained functions is just as significant.