On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 02:17:46PM +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
I posted a link to the following on the HaskellTwo wiki page. Please comment.
I would like to suggest that PatternGuards NOT be included in HaskellTwo.
While I enjoyed Simon Peyton Jones' well-written note on pattern guards [http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/Haskell/guards.html] very much, it was written a long time ago. Today it is easy to recognize that the problem he identifies is just the need for a monad, and that his proposed solution is a new syntax for introducing monadic calculations. The new syntax is messier and less general than the existing "do".
??? There is no conflict between the pattern guard syntax and the do syntax. in fact they are all of the same family, the most general being 'do' notation, list comprehensions being 'do' notation limited to the list monad and pattern guards being the 'do' notation limited to the identity monad.
Furthermore, the new syntax confuses the semantics of existing constructs.
Referring to Simon's principal example in his note, here is one way to write "clunky" without PatternGuards:
clunky env var1 var2 = fromMaybe (var1 + var2) $ do val1 <- lookup env var1 val2 <- lookup env var2 return (val1 + val2)
Now generalize it to more than two cases, or one where the second case needs to pattern match too. The magic of pattern guards is not in a single guarding expression, but in a function with many different cases which use pattern guards. Heh. Pattern guards are perhaps the best thing since sliced bread in my opinion :). certainly if I were to vote for an extension I couldn't live without they would be in the top 3. Oddly enough, I was looking over the old Haskell discussions, and pattern guards were supposed to make it into Haskell 98 according to the decision. Any idea what happened? did someone just forget to write them up or was there further discussion elsewhere? Old mailing list archives seem to be hard to come by. http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Haskell/Messages/Decisions.cgi John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈