Its only reason for existence is that if-s in C are statements and not expressions. But an if and a ternary expression do the same thing. Making two different c

Its only reason for existence is that if-s in C are statements and not expressions. But an if and a ternary expression do the same thing. Making two different constructs to do one thing doesn't sound all that simple to me. And the standard has special treatment for parsing ternary expressions. It basically says that in any "a ? b : c" pretend that "b" is surrounded with parens, so that it's effectively "a ? ( b ) : c". Because specifying a grammar that has clear precedence was too hard.