Nemerle and extra-powerful pattern matching

1

Hey guys,

I was just watching this awesome Nemerle presentation on pattern matching:

  http://blog.tkachev.com/2012/07/nemerle-pattern-matching-and-algebraic.html

and remembered reading that Jetbrains recently picked up the Nemerle team, I’d love to see some Nemerle love find its way down into Kotlin - having such awesome pattern matching would truely put Kotlin in a leage above the rest.

2

I don't see much use in powerful pattern matching for a normal user. It may be very handy for a compiler writer, but only very few of us do compilers... What we have now is flow-based typing:

https://github.com/abreslav/introduction-to-kotlin/blob/master/kotlin-examples/src/_06_smart_cast/Eval.kt#L52

It seems fine in the majority of the real-life cases, and full pattern matching is complex and cumbersome enough not to have it for the sake of rest of the cases.

3

Hrm, the flow typing really only goes some of the way and gives you switching on class type, which does clean up a lot of cases sure, but I can see plenty of areas in code I've written that would be much nicer to refactor/work with with some more pattern matching love.

Some immediate things come to mind like a billing system where things switch behaviour based on being $0 amount, or single/multi-month billing.

Maybe a compromise along the lines of Clojures multi-methods, which I think has been discussed elsewhere/before, where one when’s an expression, or something like the union/alias idea I posted in another thread ( which gets around some of the static typing issues I can see with any variation of expression matching here ).

Maybe I just want too much :slight_smile:

4

Some immediate things come to mind like a billing system where things switch behaviour based on being $0 amount, or single/multi-month billing.

What pattern matching functionality could help you there? To me it seems that a simple conditional would do the job with no problem.

Maybe a compromise along the lines of Clojures multi-methods

Do you mean that the problem is to check the type of two or more things at once? You can do that in "when":

``

when {

  x is Foo && y is Bar -> …

  …

}

Maybe I just want too much :)

Maybe you just don't really need it :)