Without a binding it is useless at top level, but if you strictify the pattern it can be useful in `let` (possibly as a sanity check where you want the program to abort if it fails). I don't recall offhand if it desugars usefully in list comprehensions, but if so it would work as a filter. There may also be other specialized use cases; general syntax tends to get reused a lot in Haskell, so making this case a syntax error could make it difficult to support actually useful cases. :)