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Surely the most likely explanation is familiary from C?

But e.g. ml-family languages (like OCaml, F#, Haskell) and Rust just have the *if* expression that has a non-void value. If your language accepts expressions as statements (most do?), then I think that should just be compatible out of the box.

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Yes, but why C had that syntax? Oh, right, because it didn't use if-then[-else]-end for the conditional statement, and reusing if(cond)[-else] with prohibited braces would be awkward.

Oh, and Lua most famously does not accept expressions as statements. Which, now that I think of it, would actually evade most of the parsing complications.

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