Because Erlang's "if" doesn't work like that. It looks like this: if IfBoolean -> "case statements only"; true -> "you didn't get a choice"

Because Erlang's "if" doesn't work like that. It looks like this: if IfBoolean -> "case statements only"; true -> "you didn't get a choice" % yes, it's "true", not "else" end In fact, Erlang's "if" is actually an if-elif chain that takes guards (unlike "case" which takes patterns) as test conditions: those are restricted set of expressions that basically allow only constants, variables, arithmetic/boolean operators and comparisons and very few built-in functions (mostly of the is_type/1 sort), and that's it. Guards are evaluated one by one until one of them evaluates to true; if none do, a run-time error is raised. It's a very unwieldy construct and at my org, we mostly try to avoid it because "case" is clearer in like 98% of the cases.