Headline no bit. Then attack if.

There would be no branching if there were no "if". It's basic assembly. Not jumps. No loops.

Yes, I think it really only works in a side-effect free language. Otherwise after the first "failure", while every resulting value also turns to None, allocation, file access, database calls still happen, so you are now in a weird limbo state where everything was done, but no handle retained and in a weird position in control flow, kind-of between the lines, which isn't expressed by any of your code.