[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Nested guards?

Nicolas Frisby nicolas.frisby at gmail.com
Tue Dec 4 22:26:59 EST 2007


It seems there is previous background here that I am unaware of. I'll
chime in anyway.

What you describe as the "wrong semantics" seems to me to be the more
appropriate. I am inferring that your expected behavior is explained
such that the first server match ought to fail (and fall through to
the second server match) because the pattern in the let fails. This
seems odd to me. If the parse test expression yields a Just
constructor, then hasn't the first server match succeeded and we ought
now commit to the let expression?

I apologize if this should be obvious to anyone familiar with the extension.

On Dec 4, 2007 2:46 PM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> > server text
> >    | Just xs <- parse text = let
> >      x | "field1" `elem` xs   = error "... do one thing ..."
> >        | "field2" `elem` xs   = error "... do something else ..."
> >      in x
> > server  _ = error "... invalid request ..."
>
> This now has the wrong semantics - before if parse text returned Just
> [] the error invalid request branch was invoked, now its a pattern
> match failure.
>
> I haven't used pattern guards that much (but will once Haskell'
> standardises them, or they get implemented in Hugs!), but their syntax
> seems quite natural. This extension seems to make it harder to
> understand them, and gives some nasty , | parsing issues for a human
> at least - quite possibly for a compiler too. Perhaps if you gave a
> little grammar for extended pattern guards (compared to the original)
> it would be easier to see how naturally they fit in.
>
> Thanks
>
> Neil
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