Deville Companies and Life

So, in joining the bandwagon, I’ve been reading about Erlang recently.

One of the features I really like is matchers:

    1 many(X) ->
    2   case X of
    3     [] ->
    4       none;
    5     [ _One ] ->
    6       one;
    7     [ _One, _Two ] ->
    8       two;
    9     [ _One, _Two, _Three |_Tail ] ->
   10       many
   11   end.

This code will respond none for an argument array of no elements, 1 for 1 and so on. The two parts of this I like are a) the fact that Erlang matches against the number of variables, without extra syntax, and b) the fact that the underscore variables are discarded.

I just found out that you can discard variables in a parallel assignment in Ruby too!!!

    1 name, _, ext = “first.name.spec“.split(“.“)
    2 name # => “first”
    3 ext # => “spec”
    4 

That my friends, is awesome, and could only be made better by allowing me to splat the _ (*_) to allow it to catch an arbitrary number of variables.

Enjoy!