Fair point. It's basically syntactic sugar. Hard to say how to properly refactor out the if statements without knowing the problem domain. And I guess that's b

Fair point. It's basically syntactic sugar. Hard to say how to properly refactor out the if statements without knowing the problem domain. And I guess that's basically the point - using if statements means that you are writing imperative code rather than modelling the problem. You are specifying to the compiler how you want things done, rather than what it is that you want done.