Agreed. Plus if the else clause has a side effect, you can't assign it to the variable, which means you need to instantiate to null or a dummy value. Very messy

Agreed. Plus if the else clause has a side effect, you can't assign it to the variable, which means you need to instantiate to null or a dummy value. Very messy. What's funny is that expression oriented languages translate really nicely to stack VMs. My hobby language compiles down to WASM and it was almost trivial to code gen if expressions.