There are non-imperative logic programming languages (Prolog) where something like that would work. And those of us who started with imperative coding are probably just as confused by them in the other direction.
That's why I qualified the statement with "conventional". Prolog is not a conventional language, in the sense that most programmers don't know it (and I'd wager close to half of programmers have never even heard of it, if not more). C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, even Rust are all imperative languages at their core and represent the dominant group of languages in conventional use.
If the OP was teaching people a language like Prolog then there wouldn't have been the same confusion.
