Re: [Caml-list] ANN: pattern guards

[Jeremy Yallop <jeremy.yallop@ed.ac.uk>]

skaller wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 15:19 +0100, Jeremy Yallop wrote:
>> I'm pleased to announce the initial release of `patterns', an OCaml
>> extension providing general-purposes additions to pattern matching.
> 
> I want to do this:
> 
> 	match x with
> 	| Y x with a=x and b=x
> 	| X (y,z) with a=y and b=z
> 	-> f a b

Interesting.  Do you want 'z' to be in scope in the guards ("a=y" etc.) 
but not in the expression ("f a b")?  Or do you just generally want to 
allow or-patterns where the branches have different bindings as long as 
the expression only uses variables that are bound in every branch?

> This won't work at the moment for two reasons:
> 
> * I assume the precedence of 'with' is the same as 'when',
>   which is not convenient

Right: "with" scopes over an entire match-case, which might include 
or-patterns, just as with "when".

> * the variables in the basic patterns don't agree
> 
> The whole point of the above is to switch all the branches
> to normalised variables. At the moment I have to write:
> 
> 	match x with
> 	| Y x -> f x x
> 	| X (y,z) -> f y z

Unless I'm mistaken you can write this as

     match x with
     | Y (y as z)
     | X (y,z)    -> f y z

Is there some more general case for which this won't work out?

Jeremy.