Yes, thank you, your code example is much better than mine.

The simplifying potential of expression-oriented languages is huge. Alan Perlis said[0]: "symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept; seek it everywhere", and this is a great example of that.

For example, languages like C and Ada have both if statements and if expressions, this is a duplication that can be eliminated by making them expression-oriented so you only have an if expression like in Haskell or ML.

But, interestingly, there is one historical case of a language going from expression-oriented to statement/expression separation: ALGOL-W[1] was expression oriented, Pascal[2], its successor, separates statements from expressions. Wirth designed both.

I don't know what the motivation was, but I suspect it's because Pascal was designed to be an educational language, and Wirth must have thought that separating expressions and statements made didactic sense when teaching programming as a recipe or list of things to do, as opposed to the more mathematized formulation of expression-oriented languages (of having an evaluation function from expressions to values).

The successors of Pascal (Ada, Modula and its sequels) retain the statement/expression separation.

[0]: http://pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/users/klaeren/epigrams.html

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_W

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)