C Anthony Risinger wrote:
* Unpacking is destructuring not pattern matching.
We're just arguing about the definition of terms now. The point I was making is that unpacking is fundamentally a declarative construct, or at least that's how I think about it. I used the term "pattern matching" because that's something unambiguously declarative. Terms like "unpacking" and "destructuring" can be misleading to the uninitiated, because they sound like they're doing something destructive to the original object.
* Tuple syntax is commas, paren, one, or both.
The only situation where parentheses make a tuple is the case of the 0-tuple. Even then, you could argue that the tuple is really the empty space between the parens, and the parens are only there to make it visible. :-) I agree that this is out of step with mathematical convention, but it does make multiple-value returns look nice. There you don't really want to have to think about the fact that there's a tuple involved. -- Greg