A short search lead to this SE post [1], which doesn't answer the "why" but says "if" is just syntactic sugar that turns into `ifThenElse`... [1]: https://soft

A short search lead to this SE post [1], which doesn't answer the "why" but says "if" is just syntactic sugar that turns into `ifThenElse`... [1]: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/195708/why-does-haskell-have-built-in-if-then-else-instead-of-defining-it-as-a-simple https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1957... The post claims that this is done in such a basic way that if you have managed to rebind `ifThenElse`, your rebound function gets called. I didn't confirm this, but I believed it.