ML-like languages offer a powerful construct called pattern-matching, allowing a programmer to safely and efficiently deconstruct structured data. This project offers a simple and generic core that implements two useful checks for pattern-matching:
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exhaustiveness: detecting when a pattern-matching construct does not check for all possibilities, e.g. <match var with | true -> [...]>.
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usefulness: reporting clauses subsumed by previous ones, like the second 0 in <match var with | 0 -> [...] | 0 -> [...] | _ -> [...]>.
It is based on Luc Maranget's paper "Warnings for Pattern Matching". Curious readers should visit his home page for more information
You should copy the files to your source directory. Do not forget utils.ml, or add its content to your home-made utility functions' file.
A client language only has to provide a module of signature Matching.SIG with appropriate functions (basically, translations to and from the module's internal representation).
A small example is available in example.ml. To build, just run .
This tiny module was originally developed for and is currently used in a full-fledged compiler for a new functional language.
Adrien Guatto
[ This work was sponsored by the French Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (National Institute for Research in Computer and Control Sciences)'s action Synchronics. ]