[plt-dev] coding ideas from JaneStreet

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 7:15 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 4:42 AM, Paulo J. Matos <pocmatos at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Awesome, this one of my favourite features missing in Scheme. Hopefully
>>> we will see this soon in TS, Sam?
>>
>> Yes, we will hopefully soon see the form Eli describes.  But it won't
>> give you exhaustiveness checking in general for `match', that's much
>> harder.
>
> I'm still looking into this, but my initial reading of the paper
> behind the current match implementation [1] seems to suggest that the
> compilation process can detect when it has to insert "else" clauses
> which should be at least a good start on this problem, no?

`match' always inserts an else clause.  The only way to write a
guaranteed exhaustiveness in Scheme in general is to write a catch-all
pattern yourself.  I don't think `match' should warn if you don't do
that, since programmers will in general know more about the
exhaustiveness of their patterns than `match' can.  For example,
should there be a warning for this code?

#lang scheme

(define/contract (f x)
   ((or/c number? string?) . -> . number?)
   (match x
     [(? number?) ...]
     [(? string?) ...]))


With type information we can do better, but providing type information
to macro expanders is not something Typed Scheme can do at the moment.
 Maybe in the future we'll figure out how to do better, but
exhaustiveness checking is very hard with an expressive pattern
language.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu