Pattern matching reaches 1.0!

I finally finished implementing pattern matching!

I just looked to see when I last updated this blog, and holy crap, it’s been half a year! I tell ya, this had better be one nice feature.

For what it’s worth, I think it is. The pattern matching is recursive, meaning you can break components down as far as you want:

case myWhatever of
    Something(List(BlahBlah(5, a), _)) -> ...

That will match if myWhatever is a Something whose only argument is a List whose first element is a BlahBlah with two arguments, the first being an int 5 and the second being anything, and that thing is now bound to the variable a.

That took a bit of work, though it only gets me to parity with other pattern matching languages. What’s neat about Haskell is that the remaining type — that is, the next line in the case list — will take all of that into account. Taking a simpler example, this would fail to compile:

case coinFlips of
    List(Heads, List(Tails, _)): ...
    List(Heads, List(Tails, _)): ...
    _: ...

because the second line is trying to match against a pattern that’s already been matched. And likewise, without that last _ -> ... line, the statement would fail to compile because some coinFlips types have not been accounted for (namely, List(Heads, Empty | List(Heads, _) | List(Tails, _)).

There’s still room for improvements:

• you can’t match against an alias or disjunctive type (ie, you can’t match for Boolean, you have to look for True and False separately)
• the “remaining type” tends to be pretty exploded out; instead of List(Heads, Empty | List(Heads, _) it might say List(Heads, Empty) | List(Heads, List(Heads, _). After a few of these exploded forms chain together, it can get pretty hairy
• There’s no tracking of values for what I call “large domain values,” such as ints (as opposed to small domain values, such as True | False. For instance, if you match an int against 5, nothing prevents you from matching against 5 again.
• There’s no mechanism for variable arity destructors, which is why the List(...) pattern above had to be desctructed node by node, instead of just as List(Heads, Tails, _)

I may pick off one or two of these soonish, but frankly I’m ready to put pattern matching aside for a bit. It’s taken longer than I’d have liked, and it’s time to move on to some more features.

I think the next thing I’m going to do is exception handling, about which I have some neat ideas. After that, I’m going to fill in the built-in types (which currently only include ints), and for strings I intend to include string interpolation. After that, I’m going to do some I/O work of some sort. And at that point, I think I’ll be ready to start writing some real code in Effes, at lon