[erlang-questions] Guards syntax for multiple values

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 8:52 AM <zxq9@REDACTED> wrote:

> How much once-cool-but-now-unused syntax is there in C++, Haskell, Ruby,
> etc?
>
>
Haskell is the exception to the rule. In Haskell,  you can define your own
operators and give them precedence. But they are just functions in the core
language. There are very few restricted keywords in Haskell (98): 28
identifiers such as 'case', 'where', 'deriving', 'class', ... and 27
symbols such as '*', '!', ... The rest are libraries defining their own
operators. Almost nothing in Haskell has special handling requiring
language extension.

Proof Assistants take this idea even further by allowing mixfix operators
to be defined. Agda allows us to define if-then-else:

if_then_else_ : ∀ {a} {A : Set a} → Bool → A → A → A
if true then t else f = t
if false then t else f = f

Where the underscores say where the holes are in the expression. That is,
the construct is not built into the language. It is *defined* as part of
the standard library[*]. This also allows far more complicated rules such
as (brace for unicode!) x ·⟨ M ⟩ y, which allows us to have an operation
(the dot) under a given magma[0] for elements x and y of that type.

Personal opinion: It is often better to add generic functionality to a
language then special case handling. The compiler is free to optimize the
generic situation if it can see some specific structure, and this has
long-term support. Whereas the other way is far more restrictive (though it
is often alluring). However, syntactic sugar might be necessary in certain
cases, as it makes code easier to read, and often more convenient to work
with. Add sugar, but add it sparingly.

[*] Note this requires evaluation order to be lazy. You can only evaluate
the two branches once you know the result of the conditional. Otherwise,
you don't have the usual semantics of this construct, which is why it is
often implement as a built-in into the language. If you have
macro-expansion, you can build it on top of case, however.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(algebra)
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