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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

Pattern matching across multiple function heads (ML, Erlang) is incredibly liberating. I hear Haskell has it but it's not idiomatic, and I think Elm doesn't support it at all. Frustrating.

I've found half-hearted pattern matching solutions like Scala quite disappointing.

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OCaml, F#, ReasonML don't support that, I think it's unique to SML in the ML family.

Interesting, thanks. SML is my only direct exposure to the family, and I recall a conference speaker mentioning that ML (perhaps SML) programmers weren't fond of the feature.

Can you give an example of the pattern matching in ML and Erlang that is not idiomatic in Haskell?

It's the multiple function heads which (again, I've been informed, no direct knowledge) is discouraged.

e.g. https://github.com/macintux/advent-of-code-2019/blob/master/...

You mean a piecewise definition of a function? I don't think this is unidiomatic or discouraged in Haskell at all.

There's some indirect discussion here that seems to contradict that, but I certainly could be wrong.

https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/973

That's in the context of Elm, Evan gives his reasons but in the context of Haskell such multi-line equations are very common and normal Haskell style.

Translating that into Haskell, I get:

  check_each :: Int -> [Int] -> Bool -> Int -> (Bool,Bool,Int)
  check_each x (y:_) _ last | y==x && x==last = (True,False,x)
  check_each x (y:_) _ last | y>x && x==last = (True,True,x)
  check_each x (y:_) found _ | y>x = (True,found,x)
  check_each x _ found _ = (False,found,x)
  
  is_valid :: (Bool,Bool,Int) -> [Int] -> Bool
  is_valid (False,_,_) _ = False
  is_valid (True,True,-1) [_] = False
  is_valid (True,True,_) [_] = True
  is_valid (True,found,shortDup) (h:t) = is_valid (check_each h t found shortDup) t

which is ugly, certainly, but compiles fine (ghc). The uglyness mainly comes from the data structures, and I don't know enough about the domain to suggest better ones (there might not be better ones).

Well, it was code I threw together quickly for Advent of Code, so try not to be too hard on it.

Eh, like I said, that might be the best you can do for a messy problem domain. I'm still not sure what you meant by multiple function heads though.

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