There's just two options: either you compute both branches and ignore one of the results, or you decide upfront which result to compute (both are valid strategi

There's just two options: either you compute both branches and ignore one of the results, or you decide upfront which result to compute (both are valid strategies depending on situation, target hardware etc...). In either case, there's a pretty high chance that the compiler turns your code into either of those options anyway, no matter what the input source code looks like. But just hiding if statements and loops under some high level functional mumbo jumbo just makes the code harder to understand for humans, and for the compiler harder to remove all the layers of 'expressiveness' and 'abstractions'.