Reconsider returning the configured undefined for else-less ifs

[adrian-zon]

(I would have just commented on #710 but it's locked)

The current behavior of always returning stock Undefined, regardless of the configured undefined class, is highly surprising. I understand the wish to be able to write {{ 'foo' if false }}, but we use a lot of if clauses for setting variables or function parameters, and I would not have expected to find Undefined instances when having undefined set to another class.

I suggest to either return a different value depending on the context (this is probably difficult or at least annoying to implement), or always return a defined value like None.

[davidism]

@ThiefMaster can you comment/decide on this?

[ThiefMaster]

See #1079 for details. Initially I had implemented it to be configurable, but then we decided to keep it simple and use standard Undefined for this particular case.

Can you come up with an actual example where this is a problem for you?

I think {{ 'foo' if false }} should never be a problem, because getting a different Undefined there would not give you any benefits.

Are you doing something like {% set foo = 'foo' if false %}? If yes, I'm not even sure if that should be allowed at all - the shortcut makes sense for display purposes bug in assignments (or function calls) it looks like something that's pretty much always not intended.

[davidism]

I do like the explanation in the changelog for that PR:

omitting the else clause is a valid shortcut and not actually an undefined variable that should cause an error

Hard to believe that was all the way back in 2019! I'm personally fine with the current behavior. Perhaps we need to add more explanation to the docs?

[adrian-zon]

Are you doing something like {% set foo = 'foo' if false %}? If yes, I'm not even sure if that should be allowed at all - the shortcut makes sense for display purposes bug in assignments (or function calls) it looks like something that's pretty much always not intended.

Yes, exactly, we have a lot of things like {% set nofollow = 'nofollow' if image.nofollow %}, and when I set undefined to UndefinedStrict I excepted to be alerted about usages of nofollow, but instead it was just an Undefined. I think this is an issue that should be resolved, either by discouraging that usage pattern or by returning the configured undefined.