Comment by turtletontine

There’s no mutating happening here, for example:

  if cond:
      X = “yes”
  else:
      X = “no”

X is only ever assigned once, it’s actually still purely functional. And in Rust or Lisp or other expression languages, you can do stuff like this:

  let X = if cond { “yes” } else { “no” };

That’s a lot nicer than a trinary operator!