Indeed, and when I teach OCaml I find that students are surprised by this. Especially as beginners tend to give names to all their pattern holes and not just the ones that they are using: if there are not the same number of holes, then it doesn’t work. That being said, as an OCaml programmer, I wouldn’t mind this feature either, but it works best with the | syntax of OCaml.
I’ve never taught O’Caml, so this is interesting. Isn’t this then a nice way to nudge those beginners into not giving a name to the holes in their patterns that they aren’t using?
Speculative: I would hope it would reduce the instances of
_ ->because it’s easier to list the remaining cases, thus meaning that updates to a custom type are more likely to produce a compiler error where appropriate.
I think this is very important - there is a big semantic difference between “everything else” and “everything else, currently”, and the lack of this syntax encourages people to do the wrong thing.
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I would think so but I can’t say I’m sure it had this effect, other than on this particular instance where it was necessary.
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This makes the stuff in expr be evaluated even if it doesn’t need to, though. Sometimes that matters.
EDIT: the solution is, of course, to extract whatever is the definition of expr to a function, and call that.
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