> "[...] making it an expression would be inconsistent with other syntactic choices in Python. All decision making logic is expressed almost exclusively in statements, so we decided to not deviate from this."

so it's just keeping in line with Python's general imperativess.

> FP constructs are increasingly discouraged in Python [...] Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, per sé

i, on the other hand, do think it's a bad thing :) but what can you do...