Prototype of 'docase' notation

[Tomas Petricek]

Thanks for the feedback - 

Someone already suggested this syntactic change at Hackathon and the GHC patch implements this syntax :-) (see e.g. the snippet at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5429). The paper used a parenthesized tuple syntax, so earlier examples use that (however, in an earlier draft I used the syntax without parenthesis). An alternative suggestion was to write "docase a | b | c of ...". This is syntactically similar to monad comprehensions, which is a good thing, but I think the syntax looks a bit odd.

I think the syntax "docase a, b, c of ..." is a good trade-off. It may be useful to give a warning when someone writes "docase (a, b, c) of ...". It should be easy to detect and it can give useful explanation.

Tomas

-----Original Message-----
From: Sebastian Fischer [mailto:fischer at nii.ac.jp] 
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2011 12:27 PM
To: Tomas Petricek
Cc: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
Subject: Re: Prototype of 'docase' notation

This is interesting.

I think using a slightly different notation would avoid confusion with matching on tuples. Why not just write

    docase a,b,c of

instead of

    docase (a,b,c) of

?

Sebastian

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Tomas Petricek <tomas.petricek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,!
> at the Cambridge Hackathon, I started implementing an extension for 
> GHC that adds the 'docase' notation. The notation is a syntactic sugar 
> that can makes it easier to write code that works with monads that 
> have three additional operations (parallel composition, choice and 
> aliasing). Such monads include various moands for parallel and 
> concurrent programming (Par monad, CPH and
> Orc) as well as other monads such as parsers.
>
> The proposal is in details discussed in our Haskell Symposium paper:
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tp322/papers/docase.html (the page also 
> contains link to earlier pre-processor based prototype with a couple 
> of more examples). I created a GHC Trac ticket to track the discussion 
> about the
> feature: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5429. A prototype 
> version of the GHC extension is available here:
> http://github.com/tpetricek/Haskell.Extensions/commits/.
>
> I'd love to hear some feedback about the feature and the extension:
>
> * Do you think this is a useful extension and do you know about any 
> monads that could benefit from it?
> * What is the best syntax for the feature? (The notation intentionally 
> resembles 'case' pattern matching, but there are some differences)
> * The feature adds some aspects of recently added monad comprehensions 
> using do-style syntax, but both 'docase' and monad comprehensions have 
> features that cannot be written using the other. Is that a good 
> desing, or should there be a closer correspondence?
> * Can anybody review the prototype implementation? (I believe it is a 
> reasonably modular change, so it should not affect the rest of the 
> language, but is there anything missing/incorrect?)
>
> Thanks!
> Tomas
>
>
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