Therefore (if False then a) would give an exception.
Yes. And the question is, why is possible to write this program using "case" but not with "if". For the first part (allow incomplete sets of patterns in "case"): No matter how hard we try, Haskell is not a total language - there'll always be programs that denote bottom, by raising exceptions (e.g., from incomplete patterns), or by non-termination - which cannot be prohibited statically if we want both the language to be Turing complete, and type inference to be decidable. Cf. Agda, which is total, and therefore has a coverage checker (for patterns) as well as a termination checker. But then the second part (do not allow incomplete "if") appears to be an inconsistency in the design. Mind you - I don't propose to change this. The question is just about justification for the design. Are there applications for an incomplete "if"? I can imagine something like assertions, as in "f x = if some-precondition x then some-computation x" Of course, that's only helpful if the exception contains source information. - J.W.