[m-dev.] Syntactic sugar for functor matching

[Thomas Conway]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 04:07:40PM EST, Ralph Becket wrote:
> Occasionally one comes across code like this:
> 
> p(constructor1(_, _, _), ...)             :- ...
> p(constructor2(_, _, _, _, _), ...)       :- ...
> p(constructor3(_, _, _, _), ...)          :- ...
> p(constructor4(_, _, _, _, _, _, _), ...) :- ...
> 
> Which looks rather awkward.  Would there be any merit in extending
> the language so that one could write
> 
> p(constructor1/3, ...) :- ...
> p(constructor2/5, ...) :- ...
> p(constructor3/4, ...) :- ...
> p(constructor4/7, ...) :- ...

I would argue that Mercury has quite enough syntactic cruft as it is!
That's not to say that such a feature might sometimes be useful, but
rather that the language contains lots of crufty syntax already, and
we would probably be better of migrating to a cleaner syntax.

<syntax wars>
Thomas "error - no matching end tag for `syntax wars'" Conway
-- 
  Thomas Conway )O+
 <conway at cs.mu.oz.au>       499 User error! Replace user, and press any key.
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