If-Else

Reason ifs are expressions; they're evaluated to their body's content:

RE
let message = if (isMorning) {
  "Good morning!"
} else {
  "Hello!"
};

Note: an if-else expression without the final else branch implicitly gives (). So this:

RE
if (showMenu) {
  displayMenu()
};

is basically the same as:

RE
if (showMenu) {
  displayMenu()
} else {
  ()
};

Which is usually what you'd expect; displayMenu() should return unit too.

Here's another way to look at it. This is clearly wrong:

RE
let result = if (showMenu) {
  1 + 2
};

It'll give a type error, saying basically that the implicit else branch has the type unit while the if branch has type int. Intuitively, this makes sense: what would result's value be, if showMenu was false?

We also have ternary sugar.

RE
let message = isMorning ? "Good morning!" : "Hello!";

Usage

if-else and ternary are much less used in Reason than in other languages; Pattern-matching kills a whole category of code that previously required conditionals. Prefer if-else if you only have, say, 2 branches.

Design Decisions

Reason ternary is just a sugar for the bool variant and a switch:

RE
switch (isMorning) {
| true => "Good morning!"
| false => "Hello!"
}

If you pass that through refmt, you'd get:

RE
isMorning ? "Good morning!" : "Hello!";

Interested? Here's a blog post about the spirit of our refmt.