[__mharrison__]

This doesn't work because the if statement is a statement. Statements don't evaluate to anything in Python, so you can't assign it to x.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Hence "make it an expression"

[otabdeveloper4]

It's way to late to fix the "statement vs expression" bug in Python's design.

We could have done that in the v3 switch, but we decided to spend man-centuries of effort on chasing already deprecated legacy Windows Unicode semantics instead.