Re: [Caml-list] Observations on OCaml vs. Haskell

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

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On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 02:08:51PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> It's annoying that strings aren't normally processed this way in OCaml, 
> and even more annoying that (^) or (::) cannot be used in pattern 
> matching over strings.

While having strings represented as lists of characters is a bad idea
for performance reasons, I don't see why we can't allow more advanced
pattern matching than simply just string equality.  I'd like to see at
least:

  match str with
    "prefix" ^ rest -> ...

which is very useful when parsing up certain types of CGI query
strings, and even better would be full regexp support:

  match str with
    "^(.+)-(.+)$" as f, t
      -> printf "range: from '%s' to '%s'" f t
  | "^(.+)$" as v -> printf "singular: '%s'" v

(this example taken from Yutaka Oiwa's regexp syntax extension written
in camlp4).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
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