New EEP draft: Pinning operator ^ in patterns

[Fernando Benavides]

Hey, Richard

Do you mind sharing the code you used to analyze OTP's codebase? I would
like to use it to analyze other large codebases as well :)

Cheers!

On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 1:34 PM Richard Carlsson <carlsson.richard@REDACTED>
wrote:

> There have been many strong reactions in this thread, so let me give you
> some statistics to show how much this feature of using bound variables is
> actually used in practice. I checked the entire OTP codebase: there are
> just over 1300 modules, and in total about 595000 variable occurrences in
> patterns, of which only 3350 are already bound.. That makes 0.56% of all
> variables in patterns - about once in 200 to make it simple. On average,
> that's 2-3 usages per module - some modules using it more and some not
> using it at all.
>
> I find it hard to see, then, why it should be a big issue to ask
> programmers to annotate these few occurrences for readability and
> maintainability. It's certainly not as big of a change as for example when
> the warning for unused variables, unless prefixed with _, was made the
> default.
>
> Imagine a world where Erlang had not allowed already-bound variables in
> patterns (forcing you to use the idiom "X1 when X1 =:= X -> ...", as in
> e.g. Haskell), and that someone now came with the suggestion that to make
> things simpler, we could just implicitly match on the value of X if X is
> already bound. The old me from my university days would probably have said
> "that's really elegant, let's do it". But the
> maintainability-and-readability me, with experience of very large code
> bases, large numbers of developers, and many relative newcomers to the
> language, would say "aw hell no". This is a cute feature, but it carries a
> large cognitive cost and is not worth having compared to how relatively
> little it is used. Being explicit about intention is much more important.
>
>         /Richard
>
>
> Den tors 24 dec. 2020 kl 21:10 skrev Richard Carlsson <
> carlsson.richard@REDACTED>:
>
>> The ^ operator allows you to annotate already-bound pattern variables as
>> ^X, like in Elixir. This is less error prone when code is being refactored
>> and moved around so that variables previously new in a pattern may become
>> bound, or vice versa, and makes it easier for the reader to see the intent
>> of the code.
>>
>> See also https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2951
>>
>> Ho ho ho,
>>
>>         /Richard & the good folks at WhatsApp
>>
>

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Brujo Benavides
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