Cutting Guards

I wrote a small example program, found that the source-to-source transform for getting rid of guards was faulty, and found that since I allow for a variadic number of arguments, a trivial transform doesn't exist.

Below, an example:

     def f = [ X ? X == 0 -> 1 | -> 15 ]

The problem with a variadic number of arguments is that in the above example you would need code for the case where an argument is consumed, but the match failed, and for the case where an argument isn't consumed. Thus, in a trivial solution, you'd copy code for every guard.

There is no trivial solution without copying code - a potential exponential blow-up -, moreover guarded matches add little in expressiveness over just using an if-then-else. I decided to cut guarded commands.