submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A design that subsumes the various syntactic forms of

if statements/expressions
switch on values
match on patterns and pattern guards
if-let constructs

and scales from simple one-liners to complex pattern matches.

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sure, there are some worse/more limited predecessors – my design was partially motivated by a desire to improve upon these.

For instance, that ML-derivative you are using for your examples

very likely still has if then else in the language, thus making it not unified
desperately tries to emulate functionality with guards that simply comes out of the box with my approach
relies on the ultimate hack of "match on unit", because match is very limited in which coding patterns it can express

Also, none of the examples are "more clear" or "have less magic":
Maybe they are more "familiar" to you personally, but that's about it.

Too me they just look clunky, full of accidental complexity and trying to work around a poor/limited language design.

this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025

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Programming Languages

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