RE: [Haskell-cafe] if-then-else as rebindable syntax (was Re: Why does Haskell have the if-then-else syntax?)

| We alreday are at a stage where first year students trying to master | haskell get error messages like | | "Bool is not an instance of the class Num" | | if they accidently write 1 + True (or something equivalent, but less | obvious). | | If you want to mess around why not call the function "provided" or | something similar. Just to be clear, to get rebindable syntax in GHC today, you have to ask for it explicitly, via -fno-implicit-prelude If you use that flag, you'd better know what it means. It already means that do-notation uses whatever (>>) and (>>=) are in scope, not Control.Monad.(>>) etc. This if-thing is just another example. No beginner will encounter this complication; they'd have to ask for it. Simon