Caterpillar

I believe that pattern-matching functions are a powerful primitive that can serve as the foundation for all control flow. Let's see how we can implement common control flow constructs based on them.

In addition to the syntax I proposed yesterday, I'm using eval here, which evaluates an anonymous function. Let's start with a simple if expression in Rust:

if condition {
    handle_then();
} else {
    handle_else();
}

In the (still, but not for much longer) fictional pseudo-Caterpillar syntax, this could map to this:

condition
{
    |true| handle_then
    |false| handle_else
}
    eval

Of course, we'll likely have an if expression in Caterpillar too. But under the hood, this is what it would translate to. An anonymous function with two branches, one matching on true, the other on false. (Which are also not in the language yet; right now we just have numbers.)

Next example, match expression in Rust:

match n {
    0 => handle_zero(),
    1 => handle_one(),
    n => handle_any(n),
}

That would be a straight-forward translation into a pattern-matching function in pseudo-syntax Caterpillar:

n
{
    |0| handle_zero
    |1| handle_one
    |n| n handle_any
}
    eval

Or you could write it as a named function:

n handle_number

# Defined somewhere else:
handle_number: {
    |0| handle_zero
    |1| handle_one
    |n| n handle_any
}

And again, Caterpillar could have a dedicated match expression too, to make this syntactically more convenient. But under the hood, if would all be pattern-matching functions.