[m-dev.] Syntactic sugar for functor matching

[Peter Schachte]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 10:56:40PM +1100, Simon Taylor wrote:
> > > one could write
> > > 
> > > 	p(X @ f(A, B, C)) :- ...
> > 
> > Um, not to be stupid, but what's wrong with
> > 
> > 	p(X) :- X = f(A, B, C), ...
> > 
> > It's barely any more verbose, already legal, and requires no new syntax.
> > Mercury doesn't even have Prolog's only-clauses-are-indexed flaw to motivate
> > this sort of feature.
> 
> Readability. If the functor is in the clause head it makes it
> clearer what is being indexed on and which case is being handled
> in the clause.

IMHO the benefit is not great enough to warrant adding more syntactic cruft
to the language.

I think we should be a bit more conservative about making syntactic
extensions, lest the langauge start to look like PL/I or C++.  Named
arguments seems like a good idea because it's a lot more useful than just
solving the

	p(f(_,_,_,_), ...)

underscore counting problem.  This proposal doesn't really solve any problem
that a well placed comment couldn't solve.


-- 
Peter Schachte              Free trade is the weapon of the strong,
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        protectionism is the shield of the weak.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- William Kaiser 
Phone: +61 3 8344 9166      
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