Since nobody has provided an example use case, I will. It's not particularly useful, but it's a minimal case that does something interesting.

func :: (Int, a) -> Maybe a
func (0, x) = Just x
func _ = Nothing

Excerpts from Brandon Allbery's message of February 23, 2017 10:51 pm:

Without a binding it is useless at top level, but if you strictify the
pattern it can be useful in `let` (possibly as a sanity check where you
want the program to abort if it fails). I don't recall offhand if it
desugars usefully in list comprehensions, but if so it would work as a
filter. There may also be other specialized use cases; general syntax tends
to get reused a lot in Haskell, so making this case a syntax error could
make it difficult to support actually useful cases. :)

(Also I'm sure someone overly clever could figure out some way to abuse it.
:)

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:41 PM, Harendra Kumar <harendra.kumar@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 24 February 2017 at 08:45, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b@gmail.com> wrote:

Literally the only use I've seen for this was a CCC puzzle. However, it
is the trivial case of something that is more useful: pattern matching the
result of an expression (say, a Data.Map.lookup when you know the key
exists).

Can you explain how that will be useful (without a binding)? Will the
pattern match be ever actually tried when there is no binding?

-harendra

--
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b@gmail.com                                  ballbery@sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net

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