Are you for or against writing "otherwise" as a keyword?

otherwise is frequently used and therefore should have been written as a keyword.\\

otherwise was coded in prelude like this otherwise = True\\ So what is the reason that otherwise was not coded as a keyword?\\ \\ To understand you have to go back. It seems that this has been done to minimize the number of keywords.\\

Today it seems surprising. And I wonder why we wrote the conditional expression with if``then``else? That's three additional keywords.\\ \\ It would have been better to write the conditional expression as in Sasl condition -> exp1 ; exp22 (By adapting the operators of course.)\\ Let's go back to otherwise . And take a look at this code.\\

otherwise :: Bool
otherwise = Prelude.otherwise

sig :: Integer -> Integer
sig n  | a   = -1
         | b   = 0
         | Main.otherwise = 1
   where { a = n < 0;
                b = n == 0 }

z :: Bool
z = if Main.otherwise == Prelude.otherwise then True else False

main :: IO ()
main = do {
                 print (sig 0);
                 print (z) }

This code works but the compiler result is different by adding or removing the first two lines of code.\\ For me it is urgent that otherwise become a keyword as in Miranda.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	8.0.2
Type	FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Compiler
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