[wonderzombie]

it is up to the user to keep track of the meaning of 'x' under all the conditions it is run

OK, so it's a bit like you're chaining assumptions together, rather than putting them next to one another? This makes Monads, esp. `>>=`, make a bunch more sense to me.

Like, the difference is between chaining/linking two operations (incl. checking what `x` is), by using the result of one check as the input to the other, and basically putting two operations next to one another (not to say that the `if` is meaningless, just that once the `if` is evaluated, the associated block has to take the `if`'s word for it).

The bonus is that Haskell handles the first part, the check, for you if you let it. It's an implicit (well sorta) and immutable precondition to whatever's next, at a logical/linguistic level.

And I guess the reason why booleans in particular are problematic is because you're sorta bolting them on, and they inherently compress information into yes/no, which is otherwise not terribly useful for the block following?