I love the fact that all if statements in Rust are expressions. It gives you a great deal of expressitivity in the language.

Let’s contrast with Python (which I love, for the record). In Python, you can do something like this:

some_condition = True
if some_condition:
    a_value = "Yeah!"
else:
    a_value = "Oh, sads."

Those are statements in the body of the if/else block; you can’t assign the block itself to a_value. However, like C, C++, Java, etc., Python does provide an expression-type conditional, a ternary expression.

So you can also do this:

some_condition = True
a_value = "Yeah" if some_condition else "Oh, sads."

This expression form of the if block is what all Rust if blocks are. So in Rust, the normal long form is:

let some_condition = true;
let a_value = if some_condition {
    "Yeah!"
}
else {
    "Oh, sads."
}

(You could also write this with a let mut a_value and then set its value inside the conditional blocks, but that’s not at all good form in Rust.)

And of course, you can shorten that rather nicely where the expressions are brief enough:

let some_condition = true;
let a_value = if some_condition { "Yeah!" } else { "Oh, sads." }

But this gets really nice when you have more complicated work to do in a Rust conditional. It doesn’t matter how many things going on inside an if expression; it’s still an expression. As such, you can also write this:¹

let some_condition = true;
let a_value = if some_condition {
    let the_answer = 42;
    let theme = "Take my love, take my land...";
    "Yeah!"  // An expression!
}
else {
    let the_question = "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?";
    let song = "You can't take the sky from me!";
    "Oh, sads."  // An expression!
}

Obviously this is totally contrived and silly; the point is that no matter what the internals are, if blocks are expressions, and their final expressions can be assigned like any other.

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As a note: I got here because I was originally thinking you couldn’t do a one-liner like you can in Python. As shown above, that’s totally false, and in fact the Rust version is much more capable than Python’s, because you don’t need a dedicated ternary when all if blocks are expressions. Rust used to have a C-style ternary (<condition> ? <value if true> : <value if false>) but it was removed during the lead-up to the 1.0 release—a decision I wholeheartedly affirm.

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1. Note that under normal conditions the compiler won’t actually accept this because of the unused names.↩