Hello everyone, This is my first post to this list so please excuse me if I'm not following all of the proper traditions for this community (posting this in the wrong place, etc.)
I like Golang a lot and I think that it's a gift to people who love computer programming. I have written three softwares in Golang and I'm really having a great time with this language. I was wondering if people would be interested in discussing the inclusion of pattern matching syntax in Golang. By "pattern matching" I do not mean regular expressions, but rather a feature that is seen in other languages such as OCaml <https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/html/book-ora016.html>. Rust also has this feature, which it simply calls "Patterns" <https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.5.0/book/patterns.html>. In particular Rust's implementation of this feature seems quite excellent actually. I think adding patterns/pattern matching to Golang would allow it to be used much more seriously in situations like building a parser, transpiler, compiler etc.. I'm sure there are other uses as well. Here is an example of what I have in mind: // Just some code to later demonstrate my proposition func getDayAndDate() (string, int) { date := getDate() if todayIsTuesday() == true { return "tuesday", date } return "not tuesday!", date } var result string // What I am proposing starts here (the below is currently not valid Golang code) result = match getDayAndDate() { "tuesday", _: "wow looks like it's tuesday", _, 5: "i don't know if it's tuesday but it's the fifth! nice!", "not tuesday!", _: "not a tuesday my dude", } Wouldn't that be cool? I don't think that existing Golang syntax allows us to accomplish stuff like this so elegantly. We'd have to do something really convoluted. The following doesn't work since switch can't handle functions with multiple return values: switch getDayAndDate() { case "tuesday", 5: println("cool!") } switch also can't handle the _ wildcard as a case value. So really there is no serious alternative to achieve pattern matching in Golang right now, as far as I can tell. I tried searching the Internet, including this mailing list, for previous discussions of this topic, and the only thing I could find was a post dating to eight years ago with little follow-up. I genuinely believe this is a great feature for Golang to pursue and I wonder if we can get the developers of this fantastic programming language and toolkit to take this feature more seriously. I'd be happy to help implement it myself if I can! Thank you, Nadim Sent from my computer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/2699b3f4-f56d-4e04-bfdb-b00fe10390e0%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
