[Python-ideas] Match statement brainstorm

[Sven R. Kunze]

On 19.05.2016 16:46, Ian Kelly wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 10:15 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> I guess the tuple structure matching idea is fairly easy to grasp.

That's true. So, I would love to have more capabilities baked into tuple 
structure matching.

>> The attribute idea would be similar to a duck-type check, though more
>> emphasizing data attributes. It would be nice if we could write a
>> match that said "if it has attributes x and y, assign those to local
>> variables p and q, and ignore other attributes". Strawman syntax could
>> be like this:
>>
>> def demo(arg):
>>      switch arg:
>>          case (x=p, y=q): print('x=', p, 'y=', q)
>>          case (a, b, *_): print('a=', a, 'b=', b)
>>          else: print('Too bad')

However, combining this (the tuple structure matching) with a 
switch-case statement is quite some change to my taste especially 
regarding Python's history with the switch-case statement.

Maybe, that is not necessary and we can introduce more features to tuple 
structure matching like Erlang has without introducing switch-case. I 
think it's more powerful and flexible on its own.

> That the first case would match attributes and not named items seems
> surprising to me. That is, just by looking at it I would have expected
> it to match {'x': 1, 'y': 2}. This feels more in line with the way
> that keyword arguments work, and more consistent with the second case
> in that both would be matching contents of collections.

Maybe, here the .x and .y syntax, which has been proposed previously 
(another with-statement enhancement proposal), could come in handy. This 
would definitely refer to attribute matching. Matching via quotation 
marks (" or ') would rather hint at dictionary keys.


Best,
Sven