Re: What databases have taught me

Keith H Duggar wrote:
>
> You know, there seems to be lots of jargon criss-cross here.
> For example, since type = class then "adding a new type to
> the class" is a senseless statement. And as we can see
> "predicate dispatch" is at least unfamiliar to some and
> "pattern matching" can mean /many/ things.
>
> What would be great is if along with flying jargon around
> you all provided /examples/ (in some psuedocode) of what
> you are trying to describe.

Ah. Well, at least I can answer for what "pattern matching" means in this context, and yes, that term is certainly used to mean quite a number of different things.

Pattern Matching in functional programming languages is a technique, vaguely similar to "switch/case" in C, that is used for decomposing union types.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching

Marshall Received on Sat Jul 01 2006 - 00:06:23 CEST