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

[Tom Schrijvers]

> I often find myself at odds with this choice. The reason is that I use
> Haskell as a host for embedded languages, and these often come with
> their own control flows. So I find myself wanting to write my own
> definition of the if-then-else construct that works on terms of some
> other type, e.g. tests on values of type Exp Bool instead of Bool, and
> at the same time make sure that the user doesn't use the built-in
> if-then-else. Sure, I can (and do) call my own version if_, ifElse or
> something else along those lines, but it's sure to be a constant
> source of programmer errors, writing if-then-else instead of if_ by
> habit.
>
> A thought that has crossed my mind on several occasions is, why not
> make the syntactic if-then-else construct rebindable, like the do
> notation? I think I know the answer already -- the do notation is
> syntactic sugar for >>= and company so it's easy to translate it into
> non-prelude-qualified versions of functions with those names. This is
> not the case for if-then-else. But it could be, the prelude could
> define a function if_ (or whatever) that the if-then-else construct is
> made to be sugar for, and thus also amenable to rebinding by not
> prelude-qualifying.

Wouldn't this cause a conflict with specialized knowledge the compiler has 
about if-then-else, e.g. for optimizations?

Tom

--
Tom Schrijvers

Department of Computer Science
K.U. Leuven
Celestijnenlaan 200A
B-3001 Heverlee
Belgium

tel: +32 16 327544
e-mail: tom.schrijvers at cs.kuleuven.be