Removal candidates in patterns

[Olaf Chitil]

Duncan Coutts wrote:

>I think it's a perfectly reasonable mental model for people to believe
>that:
>data Char = 'a' | 'b' | 'c' | ...
>data Int  = ... -2 | -1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | ...
>
>I don't see why we should remove one and not the other. Students will
>ask why the can pattern match on strings, characters and booleans but
>not numbers.
>  
>
Numbers are special because they are overloaded. A numeric literal is an 
element of many types. That clearly distinguishes them from other literals.

>Perhaps primitive recursion on integers is misleading, but people will
>still write
>
>foo n | n == 0    = ...
>      | otherwise = ...
>
>where they previously wrote
>
>foo 0 = ...
>foo n = ...
>
>so what have we gained except less notational convenience?
>  
>
Discourage anyone from teaching primitive recursion on integers. 
Recursion on integers then has to be taught as a separate topic, giving 
opportunity to point out the pitfalls. Sure, it doesn't prevent anyone 
from writing anything.

>Not all pattern matching on numeric literals is involved with recursion
>on integers, where as virtually all n+k patterns is used for that
>purpose. 
>
I think there are very few situations where you would use k patterns 
without recursion.

>So there is some distinction between the two forms. n+k
>patterns are a quirk of the numeric types. k patterns are regular with
>other types in the language.
>  
>
As I said above, they are not regular because of overloading.

>It's partly the complexity of the language and partly because our latest
>language spec (H98) is not the language that we all use (H98 + various
>extensions). I'm sure Haskell-prime will help in this area.
>  
>
I hope as well that Haskell' will be the language that most people will 
use and some extensions are certainly required for practical use. I just 
want to get rid of superfluous features.

Ciao,
Olaf