Wildcard variables

[munificent]

Admin comment: this is being implemented, feature specification, implementation issue.

Pattern matching brought a new way to declare variables. Inside patterns, any variable whose name is _ is considered a "wildcard". It behaves like a variable syntactically, but doesn't actually create a variable with that name. That means you can use _ multiple times in a pattern without a name collision.

That leads to an irregularity:

var (_, _) = (1, 2); // OK.

var _ = 1;
var _ = 2; // Error. Already a variable in scope with this name.

Also, it's annoying that _ binds a name. When you have a lambda with more than one parameter that you don't use, you end up having to do:

takesCallback((_, __, ___) { ... });

I have a proposal to fix both by saying that local variables and parameters named _ are also non-binding. This is the tracking issue for that proposal.

[Mike278]

I always love seeing those usage-pattern breakdowns across huge corpuses of Dart code!

From the proposal:

From skimming some of the examples, it does look like some users sometimes name lambda parameters _ and then use the parameter in the body.

As one of those users I just wanted to add that my two use cases for doing this are to workaround #8 (unless there's a better issue to reference?)

xs.map((_) => _.isEven);
// vs
xs.map(.isEven); // strawman syntax

and #3001:

users.map((_) {
  final (user, selected) = _;
  ...
})
// vs
users.map((user, selected) {
  ...
})

[lrhn]

I've tried to hunt down the places in the specification that would need to change to make wildcard variables work.
It's not as many as one could fear, but then, I probably didn't find all of them.

Collected here: https://gist.github.com/lrhn/c14c76c665a1e20f42e283d1fe6e6e02

Those changes (plus the similar places I've missed) should simply make _-named local declarations or type variables not introduce any name into the surrounding scope. That makes it not an error to have two declarations named _, since the error comes from adding them in the same scope, and there is nothing extra to do.

(If we get #3807, more changes are needed, to not make it an error for an optional parameter named _ to not have a default value. That'd also be a behavior where not having a name is materially different from having an implicit fresh private name.)

[munificent]

As one of those users I just wanted to add that my two use cases for doing this are to workaround #8 (unless there's a better issue to reference?)

xs.map((_) => _.isEven);
// vs
xs.map(.isEven); // strawman syntax

Yeah, it's not an unreasonable use of _. But I think the best workaround today is to just give the parameter a real but short name.

[lrhn]

I have no issue considering xs.map((x) => x.isEven) idiomatic code.

Short names are allowed for iteration variables. Nobody complains about for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++), and they shouldn't complain about values.map((v) ...) or elements.forEach((e) { ... }) either.
Long names are long, and sometimes a single letter is a perfectly reasonable way to identify a value, if there is no ambiguity about what it means.
It's not an abbreviation (which you should avoid), it really is just a brief and unambiguous name for a transient value.