Just check out the paper's Motivaton section (2).
In ML you can't write something like this:
if e is
...
Lit(value)
and Map.find_opt(value) is Some(result)
then Some(result)
...
where the `...` may include many cases and may contain other Lit cases, so that you would need to refactor the whole expression.Haskell's pattern guards can do this, but they can't "split" control-flow in the middle of a case, as in:
Lit(value)
and Map.find_opt(value) is Some(result)
and computation(result) is
Left(a) then ...
Right(b) then ...
but these all fall out completely naturally in the UCS.Also, exhaustiveness Just Works without the need of any type annotation. The system is actually type system agnostic.
PS: there's another point being made on Reddit about cond's right-shift problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1g127...
Re:The Ultimate Conditional Syntax
by halostatue on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:51PM
(#41906534)
Thank you. I think that I’ll need to read this again with that particular comment in mind, because that makes sense.
The limitations of Elixir syntax means it would need to be something more like:
ucs do
expensive() =>
and cheap1() -> "branch 1",
and cheap2() -> "branch 2",
cheap3() -> "branch 3"
end
There are other ways around it, but it could be fun to try to build a macro in Elixir for the UCS.
Re:The Ultimate Conditional Syntax
by andrewstuart on Monday October 21, 2024 @06:15AM
(#41902553)
My eyes! They burn!
Re:The Ultimate Conditional Syntax
by halostatue on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:46PM
(#41906484)
They should. This nesting is why `with` exists, but even if `cond` and `case` could test for exhaustiveness (they can't currently, and I don't think that `cond` ever could), `with` would not be able to test for exhaustiveness, since there's always two paths described.
In many ways what's described is much closer to `cond`, except that `cond` is completely open ended except for the required `true` clause, which means that there is absolutely no exhaustiveness checking.
I'll admit that I mostly skimmed this and I don't use ML or Haskell, but I couldn't see what benefit this provides over Elixir's `case` or Rust's `match` (recognizing that the former can't do exhaustiveness checking as yet, but `match` absolutely can).