[Haskell-cafe] Why does Haskell have the if-then-else syntax?

[Paul Hudak]

Mike Gunter wrote:

>I had hoped the "History of Haskell" paper would answer a question
>I've pondered for some time: why does Haskell have the if-then-else
>syntax?  The paper doesn't address this.  What's the story?
>
>thanks,
>-m
>  
>
Thanks for asking about this -- it probably should be in the paper.  Dan 
Doel's answer is closest to the truth:

    I imagine the answer is that having the syntax for it looks nicer/is
    clearer. "if a b c" could be more cryptic than "if a then b else c"
    for some values of a, b and c.

except that there was also the simple desire to conform to convention 
here (I don't recall fewer parentheses being a reason for the choice).  
In considering the alternative, I remember the function "cond" being 
proposed instead of "if", in deference to Scheme and to avoid confusion 
with people's expectations regarding "if".

A related issue is why Haskell does not have a "single arm" conditional 
-- i.e. an "if-then" form, which would evaluate to bottom (i.e. error) 
if the predicate were false.  This was actually discussed, but rejected 
as a bad idea for a purely functional language.

  -Paul