IF statements and ELSE statements

IF statements and ELSE statements are not allowed in the general SQL processing flow of MySQL scripts. They are only allowed in functions and stored procedures.
Looking back at my research, that makes sense
- you can only ever find documentation on the IF statement in the context of stored procedures and functions;
however, the document is really really poor at announcing that (I guess it just assumes you are reading the entire MySQL manual from start to end or something).