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Re: Incompatibility with pattern matching

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 76 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 76 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Andre van Tonder <andre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> It seems that the constructor paradigm chosen in the draft does not easily 
> accommodate future extensions for pattern matching.  The problem is that a 
> constructor can be many to one.  E.g., in
>
>   (define-type foo (x y)
>     (fields a immutable (+ x y)))
>
> we cannot automatically generate a pattern that can be used (like in MzScheme):
>
>   (match (make-foo 1 2)
>    ((make-foo x y) .....))
>
> Indeed, since the record types of this SRFI are not freely generated, 
> automatic destructuring is not a sensible operation.

This is true as far as pattern matching by position is concerned.  I
personally think this is a good thing, as pattern matching by position
scales very poorly. 

I don't think your argument extends to pattern matching by name, and I
can imagine a variety of abstractions on top of the SRFI draft that
would accomodate it.
<
-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla