[rat87]

> In an appropriately powerful language, it could be a function call.

> This is all very well if you have a friendly, high level scripting language like Ruby, but I'm definitely glad I don't have to write a C compiler where functions can take arbitrary blocks of code.

That's a surprisingly good setup because in Smalltalk(one of ruby's main ancestor languages)

if/else is a method which takes a block closure.

    a ifTrue: [ l log: 'a is true'] ifFalse: [ 'a is false']

while

in ruby if else is a syntatic construct

    if a
        l.log ('a is true')
    else
        l.log ('a is false')
    end

probably more for perceived clarity/comfortability then speeds sake.