Nested Guards

[Ronny Wichers Schreur]

Bas van Dijk writes (to the haskell-prime list):

> The Clean Report[1] is not really clear on that but to my knowledge  
> nested
> guards do not have fall-through semantics.
>
> The report does mention this:
>
> "To ensure that at least one of the alternatives of a nested guard  
> will be
> successful, a nested guarded alternative must always have a  
> 'default case' as
> last alternative."

I don't think this explanation is accurate. The reason that a nested  
guard must
have a default case is syntactical, otherwise there could be the  
dangling-else
ambiguity. If I remember correctly, the compiler can handle nested- 
guards with
fall-throughs just fine.

There have been proposals to use the offside rule to resolve the  
ambiguity, but
I can't recall if this was implemented.

See <http://mailman.science.ru.nl/pipermail/clean-list/ 
1997/000175.html> for
some examples.


Cheers,

Ronny Wichers Schreur