Today’s tech talk was about functional pattern matching. This was a really fun one since I’ve been sort of “evangelizing” functional programming at work, and it was a blast seeing everyone ask poignant and intersting questions regarding pattern matching.

What spurred the conversation today was a question my boss asked me which was “how is pattern matching actually compiled?” which led me to find this blog post describing different ways the f# compiler compiles pattern matching. The short of it is that the compiler generates a souped up switch statement where it checks each pattern in order. Sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s OK.

In the process of researching for the tech talk I came across a great paper entitled Pattern Matching in Scala which discussed, obviously, pattern matching in Scala, but also talked about F#, Haskell, and Erlang pattern matching. The interesting thing to me here is how Scala got around comparing classes instead of just algebraic data types. Scala makes you implement classes as specific case classes when you want to be able to match on them, and also you have to implement apply and unapply methods which effectively “box” and “unbox” your pattern.

I don’t have much experience with Scala (I skimmed a Scala book and wrote a hello world, but that’s it), but I am familiar with how F# handled this scenario which is via Active Patterns. I like this since you can mix and match active patterns to provide your own custom way to “compare” items.

An example I used in our talk today was

  
let (|Pattern1|\_|) i =  
 if i = 0 then Some(Pattern1) else None

let (|Pattern2|\_|) i =  
 if i.ToString() = "yo mamma!" then Some(Pattern2) else None

let activePatternTest () =  
 let x = 0  
 match x with  
 | Pattern1 -\> printf "pattern1"  
 | Pattern2 -\> printf "pattern2"  
 | \_ -\> printf "something else"

Which really drives the point home that you can do custom work in your pattern match and hide it away from the user. Another, more real world, example is how I matched on regular expressions in my parsec clone project

  
let (|RegexStr|\_|) (pattern:string) (input:IStreamP\<string, string\>) =  
 if String.IsNullOrEmpty input.state then None  
 else  
 let m = Regex.Match(input.state, "^(" + pattern + ")", RegexOptions.Singleline)  
 if m.Success then  
 Some ([for g in m.Groups -\> g.Value]  
 |\> List.filter (String.IsNullOrEmpty \>\> not)  
 |\> List.head)  
 else  
 None

Which can be used to hide away regular expression pattern matching. The usage of this would now be:

  
member x.regexMatch (input:IStreamP\<string, string\>) target =  
 if String.IsNullOrEmpty input.state then None  
 else  
 match input with  
 | RegexStr target result -\> Some(result.Length)  
 | \_ -\> None

Nice and clean, just the way I like it.

Anyways, pattern matching is a really powerful construct and it’s a shame that it’s not available in many OO languages.