Dylan Thurston wrote:

So I guess that in

foo [/ a? 2 b /] = (a,b)

the type of a is '[Int]', not 'Maybe Int', right?

Aye. If you wanted Maybe Int, you would need to do foo [/ a@_? 2 b /] = (a,b) I wrote:

...

I'm starting to think maybe our context dependent approach to implicit bindings isn't very good after all since it seems to confuse a lot of people. Perhaps variables bound inside regular patterns should always be non-linear... of course that would still be context dependent when compared to normal Haskell patterns, but perhaps still less confusing?

Dylan Thurston wrote:

Alternatively, you could forbid the use of simple variables nonlinearly, since there's an alternative way to write it. Or, you could make variables (and other pattern binding) more context dependent, recording all the relevant parts of the context (and not just whether the context is linear or not), if that makes sense.

Interesting issues, anyway!

Indeed they are. We basically have two reasons for not wanting to record the context in bound variables. The first is that it would not correspond very well with ordinary pattern matching, and we sought to minimize the differences by only adding the context dependence that was impossible to avoid. The second is that there is a way to get at that context information already, by explicitly binding larger patterns (cf. the example above). In contrast, were we to record contexts in all bound variables there would be no way to avaid the context information should you want to. As an example catMaybes :: [Maybe a] -> [a] catMaybes [/ (Just a | Nothing)* /] = a If we were to record the context in which a appears, we would have removed one data constructor (Just) but added another (Left). Perhaps even more illustrating would be catEithers :: [Either a a] -> [a] catEithers [/ (Left a | Right a)* /] = a Dylan Thurston wrote:

By the way, are nested regular expression matches allowed? Something like:

foo :: [[Int]] -> Int foo [/ _* [/ 5* a 6* /] _* /] = a

Absolutely. We've added regular patterns as a new pattern category in Haskell, so anywhere that you can use a standard pattern you can use a regular pattern, including inside a regular pattern. Dylan Thurston wrote:

? If so, what is the type of a in

foo [/ _* [/ 5* a* /]* _* /]

?

It will be [[Int]]. a has type [Int] in the inner pattern, and in the outer pattern it appears in non-linear context (inside the *). Compare to foo [/ _* (Just a@(_:_))* _* /] = a Here the a clearly binds to a list in the inner expression, and in the regular pattern it appears in non-linear context. So here foo :: [Maybe [a]] -> [[a]] As an aside, the patterns above will always give a the empty list since the first _* will "eat" the entire input, being greedy and all. But of course that won't affect the types... With the package you can try out the types yourself. Just write these functions in a source file and load it into ghci following the guidelines on the homepage (http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00nibro/harp/). Then you can let ghci infer the types for you. =) /Niklas _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail