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

[Jon Fairbairn]

On 2006-07-27 at 01:33EDT Paul Hudak wrote:
> 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 a sense, it explicitly wasn't: I suggested "if _ then _
else _ fi" -- something I was long used to from Algol68 --
but it was rejected on the ground that there wasn't a
dangling else problem in Haskell.  I probably muttered
something about wanting things to be self-bracketing (I've
certainly grumbled inwardly since about having to write "(if
_ then _ else _)¹" in some Haskell contexts), but since I'm
quite slow witted, I expect that the discussion had moved on
by then.
 
> 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".

Did we talk about Dijkstra's "fat bar", or was that a
discussion I had elsewhere?

  Jón

[1] which I find ugly, and besides, making all like
constructs self-bracketing would have allowed a saner (to my
mind) layout rule.


-- 
Jón Fairbairn                              Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk