You did say that only Lisp implements "if" as a function, but I thought I'd share that in Haskell "if" is syntactic sugar for a case expression. That is: if

You did say that only Lisp implements "if" as a function, but I thought I'd share that in Haskell "if" is syntactic sugar for a case expression. That is: if x then y else z is sugar for: case x of True -> y False -> z There have been suggestions to replace this sugaring with a proper "if" function, e.g.: if :: Bool -> a -> a -> a if True x _ = x if False _ y = y to remove arguably redundant syntax, but it seems unlikely that this change would happen. See more here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/If-then-else http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/If-then-else