Description
What Rust calls "pattern guards" are just called "guards" in Haskell. Pattern guards in Haskell allow additional evaluation and a refutable pattern match. If that pattern match fails, it's as if a regular guard returned false
. Here's an example, adapted from the HTML5 tokenizer I'm working on.
fn process_char(&mut self, chars: CharSource) {
match self.state {
TagOpen => match chars.next() {
'/' => { self.state = EndTagOpen; }
c if (Some(a) <= c.to_ascii_opt()) => { do_something(a.to_lower()); }
c if other_condition => { ... }
_ => parse_error()
(I'm not advocating for this particular concrete syntax, just trying to get the idea across.)
One can always refactor to avoid the fancy guard, but in general it can produce ugly, hard-to-follow trees of nested matches. In this case I would love to have a single match per tokenizer state which closely follows the specification.
Pattern guards have proven tremendously useful in GHC and were one of the few GHC extensions accepted into Haskell 2010. I think Rust could benefit just as much.