[pestaa]

Yes, you are absolutely right. I forgot about this one major difference. However, you cannot generally say if-then-else is a statement; there are languages such as CoffeeScript in which if-then-else works exactly like the conditional operator and therefore has a type and return value.

As for the priority mess, I spend my brain cycles elsewhere and use parentheses, which also helps the next guy as well as me.

[fosap]

Or virtually every language that is functional in a way. For example Lisp and Haskell.