Matchish

Matchish is an exercise in implementing pattern-matching for Ruby. It is not a production-level code (and not released as a gem therefore), but just a proof-of-concept.

You can look at corresponding blog post to see the rationale and overview, and also the rationale of why it is not a gem.

Nevertheless, features:

• As natural to Ruby as it could be:

require 'matchish'
require 'matchish/m' # shortening of all "matchish" to "m"

case arg
when String # your usual Ruby check
when Fixnum.m.guard{|x| x > 3} # Matchish!
when [Object.m.as(:x), *Object.m].m # Matchish!

end

# Or, another example:

%w[one two three].grep(/tw/) # your usual Ruby grep
%w[one two three].grep(String.m.with(length: 3)) # Matchish!

• Complex patterns and Ruby types being algebraic

case arg
when [{test: String.m}.m, Object.m, *Hash.m].m
  # catches ONLY array with:
  # * first item being a hash with exactly one key: :test, and value - kind of string,
  # * second item being any value
  # * then any number of items, each of them should be hashes
when Time.m.with(year: 2015)
  # catches ONLY time with year == 2015
end

• On-the-fly deconstruction

# local variable flavor
case arg
when [(x = Fixnum.m), x, *Object.m].m # matches [1,1,3,4], but not [1,2,3,4]
  p x.value # => 1
end

# as/match flavor
case arg
when [Fixnum.m.as(:x), Object.m.as(:x), *Object.m].m # matches [1,1,3,4], but not [1,2,3,4]
  p Matchish.last_match[:x] # => 1
end

• Guards

flag = true

case x
when (1..3).m.guard{flag} # only matches when flag is true
when (1..3) # matches otherwise
end

Playing with code

git clone git@github.com:zverok/matchish.git
bundle install
bundle exec dokaz Article.md

NB: several examples from Article.md are failing. It's ok - they are showing, exactly, parts of Ruby syntax which are NOT working.