[racket] Pattern matching define macro

From: Stephen Chang (stchang at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 15 17:40:48 EDT 2014

> Is there any reason why you can’t just use match-patterns instead of using ($ match-pattern) ?

The idea was to support a generic interface so different instances
could be defined, but thus each instance needs it's own name. For
example, I need to differentiate when I'm binding a match pattern vs
binding multiple values.

I tried to define shortcuts for some match patterns like $list and I
suppose you could rename them to be the same as racket but I didnt
want to clash with racket's names. There's also define-match-bind to
create your own shortcuts.


> And is there anything like a “generic-binding-expander” that would act sort of like a match-expander?

No there isnt. It was a todo but I never got around to it. Did you
have something specific in mind?


> And is there some kind of "generic-bind/renamed” module or something that provides everything from generic-bind except without the ~ in front?

Good idea. Yes, in hindsight my choice of names was probably
suboptimal. I've incorporated your suggestion so now you can do
(require generic-bind/as-rkt-names), which drops all ~-prefixes
(except for ~vs). Thanks!


>
>
> On Jul 15, 2014, at 3:02 PM, Stephen Chang <stchang at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>>> I just found this, which has a lot of forms for just about everything I can think of (and more) that support things like match-patterns:
>>> https://github.com/stchang/generic-bind
>>>
>>> I haven’t tried it yet, but It looks pretty amazing.
>>>
>>> It probably has everything you want.
>>
>> Thanks for the kind words. :)
>>
>> This was an experiment that tried to address a few questions that
>> repeatedly get asked on the mailing list:
>>
>> 1) that you can't destructure data structures at the binding site, and
>> 2) that you need to manually define many different versions of each
>> binding construct (eg define, match-define, match-define-values, etc),
>> which inevitably means that some binding forms don't exist (eg
>> match-for/X forms)
>>
>> Something like the expressivity problem for binding forms.
>>
>> I tried to implement one "generic" version of each binding form that
>> would accept many different "binding instances", so every binding form
>> would be extensible by implementing the appropriate instance (eg, a
>> matching instance, a values instance)
>>
>> Every Racket binding form should have a ~-prefixed version in my
>> library and my version should work as a drop-in replacement for its
>> Racket counterpart if you want to try it out.
>>
>> Here's a link to the docs if you're interested in reading more:
>> http://stchang.github.io/generic-bind/generic-bind.html
>>
>> (You can tell that it hasn't been updated in a while from the old css.)
>>
>> Caveat: my macro-fu hasn't quite reached expert level so I'd love for
>> anyone to tell me where my code is bad.
>>
>> That being said, I ran a large part of the Racket test suite using my
>> binding forms instead of the Racket ones so they should be usable in
>> most scenarios.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On Jul 13, 2014, at 12:41 AM, Alexander D. Knauth <alexander at knauth.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Jul 12, 2014, at 10:17 PM, Alexander D. Knauth <alexander at knauth.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Jul 12, 2014, at 6:43 PM, Brian Adkins <racketusers at lojic.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I probably won't keep my defpat macro, at least not in its present form (for one, it only handles a single arg); there's probably a balance between being concise and being general/flexible.
>>>>>
>>>>> Although define/match is definitely more powerful, if you want it, this would probably be a good version of what you want that would handle multiple arguments:  (I’ll reply again if I get one to work with optional and/or keyword-arguments)
>>>>> (define-syntax defpat
>>>>> (syntax-rules ()
>>>>>  [(defpat (f arg-pat ...) body ...)
>>>>>   (defpat f (match-lambda** [(arg-pat ...) body ...]))]
>>>>>  [(defpat id expr)
>>>>>   (define id expr)]))
>>>>
>>>> Ok I just made a version of defpat that can handle multiple arguments, optional arguments, keyword-arguments, and optional keyword-arguments.
>>>> I also made a form called my-match-lambda that defpat uses to do this.
>>>> https://github.com/AlexKnauth/defpat
>>>> Also to do this I had to make it so that you have to use square brackets to specify optional arguments, otherwise it couldn’t tell between an optional argument and a match pattern.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ____________________
>>>  Racket Users list:
>>>  http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
>


Posted on the users mailing list.