18.12.08
Type Safe Pattern Combinators, by Morten Rhiger
An ingenious set of combinators for expressing pattern matching in a type-safe way. No ADTs required. Opens up the possibility of programming languages where we can declare new binding forms just as we declare new functions. Revolutionary, but may have been hard to publish before Programming Pearls were created---it shows why they are a good idea.
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5 comments:
Broken link to the PDF. I guess you omitted the http:// when constructing the link with blogger, so it assumed you wanted the link to be relative to your blog.
Link fixed. Thanks!
oh, by "pattern matching" i had in mind "regexps" but it is really "on the way to macros for ML/Haskell" which is (to me) much more interesting. cool!
Best paper I've seen since ICFP. Hopefully this leads to some cool syntactic sugar.
How does this approach relate to Tullsen's First-Class Patterns? From my brief skim, it would seem this paper relies on continuation-passing style for a full encoding of pattern matching, whereas Tullsen's patterns rely on a monadic encoding. There is a deep connection between the CPS and monads, so I suppose that shouldn't be surprising.
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