If-then-else Statements

The syntax in Haskell for if-then-else statements is:

if <CONDITION> then <EXPRESSION1> else <EXPRESSION2>

where the CONDITION must be a boolean expression. If the condition evaluates to True, then EXPRESSION1 is used, otherwise, EXPRESSION2 is used. One other thing to note here is that both expressions in the if statement must be of the same type. For example, the statement:

if True then 1 else "untrue"

is invalid because the type of 1 is Int, but the type of "untrue" is String (synonym for [Char] - a string is simply a list of characters).

Let's take a look at a simple example function using a conditional statement to decide on the final score on a race track given two arguments – the time achieved and the average time for the track in seconds:

trackScore :: Float -> Float -> String
trackScore time avgTime =
  if time < avgTime
  then "Great! Your time is " ++ show (avgTime - time) ++ " seconds 
    below average!"
  else "Your time is " ++ show (time - avgTime) ++ " seconds above 
    average."

You have probably noticed this new function show – it is a method (function) from the class Show and it is used to represent the value of a type as a string. Hence, it has the following type signature:

show :: a -> String

We will explore classes in more detail later on - for now, just know that a class comes with certain methods (functions) it supports.

All the basic types (Bool, String, Char, Int, Integer, Float and Double) are instances of the Show class which enables us to use the show function and get their representation as a string:

ghci> show 252.5
"252.2"

In our function trackScore, we consider the two cases where the given time is lower than the average time and when it is higher than the average time. But what if it is exactly the same?

ghci> trackScore 10 10
"Your time is 0.0 seconds above average."

The output is not wrong, but ideally, we would like to see a third version of the output for this particular case. We could nest another if statement in our existing code and write:

trackScore :: Float -> Float -> String
trackScore time avgTime =
  if time < avgTime
    then "Great! Your time is " ++ show (avgTime - time) ++ " seconds 
      below average!"
    else 
      if time == avgTime
        then "Your time is on par with the average time!"
        else "Your time is " ++ show (time - avgTime) ++ " seconds above 
          average."
      
ghci> trackScore 10 10
"Your time is on par with the average time!"

The output is fine now, but with every nested if statement, the code gets harder to read. Turns out there is a way to make it look nicer – with MultiWayIf.