[plt-dev] coding ideas from JaneStreet

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> 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?) ...]))

No. If match can't tell it isn't exhaustive, it should be quiet; so it
can just assume that predicates cover everything (and insert an error
to be sure) This one, on the other hand:

(match x
  [`(x ,(? number?)) ...]
  [`(,_ ,(? string?)) ...]

should signal an error or warning or something since the
non-two-element-list case is not covered.

> 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.

Yes, I know. If you reconsider my words under the assumption that I do
indeed know that, I'd be grateful.

Robby