Talk:Pattern matching

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Typing failure

"Pattern matching failure can often be ascribed to a type signature that is not strong enough or is incorrect."

I took that out because although I can imagine type signature can be blamed, I'm not at all assured that's a frequent or even reasonable cause. At least in Haskell, pattern type and expression type are statically checked to match. Perhaps if the type of a function is Maybe Integer -> Integer but giving Nothing as argument causes a matching failure, so the point would be the type should actually be Integer -> Integer? --82.181.66.63 10:32, 18 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]


Scope of this article

This article started as one about pattern matching in the ML family of programming languages. At some point a mention of Mathematica was added as an additional example. It's an interesting programming language, but not a general-purpose one, and its flavour of pattern matching is problematic as it's computationally expensive (NP-complete?). Thus I question whether the recent addition of the examples in Mathematica syntax and focus of discussion matter into regex-like features can keep the article focused. There already are articles about Mathematica and regexes, respectively, and their intersection might perhaps even warrant an article of its own. Be bold in your edits, but please include a comment, and discuss if you want to reach mutual understanding. --TuukkaH 22:54:17, 2005-09-03 (UTC)

Ok, this is still going into more general direction, I hope it works out well for an article with such an ambitious title :-) I just moved Mathematica and string pattern matching stuff into their own subsections. Now to make this more balanced, we would need at least:
  • a subsection about Snobol syntax
  • a short section and a see also to string patterns (regexes?)
  • a subsection about history of pattern matching
  • more examples to illustrate the points
  • diagrams about patterns
--TuukkaH 01:34:26, 2005-09-10 (UTC)
I have a number of comments. First is that I think its a good idea to work together to make this a great section. However I respectfully disagree with the claims that Mathematica is not a general purpose language. I see it as an extremely general purpose language, that happens to also have a whole bunch of math functionality built it. (It is certainly as general purpose as ML or Haskell, and in some ways more so because of its graphics, import/export, and support for very wide array of programming constructs). It is true that the pattern matching in Mathematica is theoretically NP complete; yet in practice this is rarely an issue. Besides, I think it's good to cover pattern matching in all of its radically different flavors.
Perhaps we won't want to use the term general-purpose in this article then :-) There must be reasons why the programming language of Mathematica is without family. I can't but think it's designed as a scripting tool for symbolic mathematics, also built-in math already makes it special-purpose. Also, general-purpose is orthogonal with multi-paradigm. You do know that Haskell has been used to implement Perl 6 (Pugs), a revision-control system (Darcs) and an operating system with a graphical user-interface (House)? --TuukkaH 16:57, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think my concept for the article is to list a bunch of ways pattern matching can be used, and then show how 2-3 "paradigmatic" languages implement those ideas. In a way, my structure was an implicit challenge. Mathematica's use of pattern matching is quite frankly powerful and advanced, and I wanted to see if people could post examples in other languages of the same sorts of things. (I am happy to see that this challenge has been met in some of the places). But it is not unreasonable to organize it by language rather than by application of pattern matching. I agree that diagrams would be helpful. --Kovas
It should be clear by now that I would prefer Haskell as the general syntax and to absolutely keep info about Mathematica in. I start another thread below, because I'm starting to have a hard time thinking of all the organizational possibilities. --TuukkaH 16:57, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding complexity of pattern matching, with GHC's view patterns extension, pattern matching in Haskell can be arbitrarily complex. — Daf (talk) 02:08, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Section structure

Contents at the moment:

  1. Primitive patterns
  2. Tree patterns
  3. Filtering data with patterns
  4. Pattern matching in Mathematica
    1. Declarative programming
  5. Pattern matching and strings
    1. Tree patterns for strings
    2. Example string patterns

Contents from a previous version by Kevin:

  1. Primitive patterns
  2. Structure patterns
  3. Pattern matching for user-defined types
  4. Extracting data with patterns
  5. Patterns for declarative programming
  6. Pattern matching and Strings

Stuff I'd want to cover:

  • Important uses: function definitions, filtering and extraction, replacing (==rewriting?)
  • Languages: SNOBOL, Perl?, Mathematica, Haskell
  • Patterns: primitives, combination, regexes, trees, advanced features
  • History of pattern matching

Some of the language stuff can go to language-specific articles and some of the pattern stuff could go to a separate article about patterns if there are a lot of general features to discuss. --TuukkaH 16:57, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So a tentative table of contents:

  1. Patterns (primitive, in Haskell function definitions)
    1. Sequences (Perl, regexes)
    2. Trees (combinations into trees)
  2. Filtering and extraction
  3. Rewriting
  4. Mathematica (syntax, advanced features, symbolic features)
  5. History
    1. SNOBOL (syntax)

--TuukkaH 16:57, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

AI

Am I wrong in thinking pattern matching is used in AI? It doesn't seem to be mentioned on the page at all.

I'm thinking of the syntax matching Parry did, when he converted sentences into basic syntax forms. Thanks,

--Elín 23:08, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Scope too narrow

Pattern-matching is used by the human brain - it is one of our greatest strengths. One of the first things a baby masters is the visual tracking of human faces. But this article only mentions pattern-matching from the computer standpoint. Grassynoel 09:03, 16 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrectly titled?

Seems like this article should be titled "Pattern matching in Haskell", not "Pattern matching".

Well, not really - it also talks about pattern matching in Mathematica...
I'm glad we all agree it should be titled something like "Pattern matching in obscure languages". For my part I would expect to see a pattern matching article mention things like Rete or Levensthein distance rather than deep dives into various peoples' favorite obscure languages. Hard to even give this article points for mentioning regular expressions because they're barely examined.

An article that treats a class of algorithms should be offering information about those algorithms and techniques in a language-agnostic sense, not losing the reader in the syntax and implementation details of an specific implementation language. -- Mikeblas 17:11, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What is "language-agnostic" in the context of programming? The sort of pseudocode I've seen usually bears a striking resemblance to the favoured language of its progenitor (typically Pascal or C).
Should Wikipedia articles be written in a "natural language agnostic" sense, by avoiding the use of English? Should we invent a "pseudo-English", whose only purpose is to avoid losing readers in the details of actual English? I am being facetious, obviously, but there is a serious point to be made here. It's a bit too constraining to talk about programming without being able to present any actual source code.
Yes again you've nailed it. This should not be a programming centric article.
Could you be more specific about which pieces of the text you think go into the details of Haskell too much, in the context of this article?—greenrd 19:34, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation page

I've added a hatnote indicating this article (currently) concerns itself with pattern matching in functional programming languages, even though the lead does not accurately reflect this. "Pattern matching" is often used as a synonym for string matching and especially pattern recognition. Perhaps this should be turned into a disambiguation page instead? —Ruud 12:02, 7 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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This is just terrible

The article seems to be languishing and does not provide an overview of pattern matching is modern languages, where a common set of functionality is emerging -- it references a bunch of these (Scala, F#, Haskell) but the examples are too ML- and Mathematica-centric, and the Haskell example is hard to follow. Gvanrossum (talk) 04:32, 16 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Split article?

As it stands now (and as has been mentioned several times over the years on this very talk page) the article is a bit schizophrenic.

So, perhaps it would be a good idea to split off most the article body into a separate article, e.g. named Pattern matching (programming languages) or Pattern matching (conditional)? – Tea2min (talk) 13:46, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Tea2min: This article already has a disambiguation hatnote that explains that this article is about pattern matching in functional programming languages. Pattern matching in strings is also known as "string matching." Jarble (talk) 01:05, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Jarble: Well, yes. I guess what I am trying to say is that "pattern matching in functional programming languages" may not the primary topic for the term "pattern matching", and furthermore, there is a whole section in the article talking about Pattern matching and strings ("By far the most common form of pattern matching involves strings of characters. ..."), so the article is not exclusively about pattern matching in functional programming languages. (Perhaps it's just that I find it confusing that big parts of the article talk about Mathematica.) – Tea2min (talk) 06:11, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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