Menu
I am writing a compiler for a functional language I designed with OCaml. I want my little language to have the feature of pattern matching, however, I got stuck in coming up with an algorithm to implement it. It seems really complicated as I dig into the problem. I can't find much useful information about the corresponding algorithm with google. I will be appreciated if someone can give me some hint or point me to the resources. Or are there any tricks to take advantage of OCaml's power in pattern matching to solve this problem so that I don't need to implement it? Thanks!
607
asked Nov 27 '13 02:11
Pattern matching comes up in several places in OCaml: as a powerful control structure combining a multi-armed conditional, unification, data destructuring and variable binding; as a shortcut way of defining functions by case analysis; and as a way of handling exceptions.
Pattern matching algorithms are the algorithms that are used to figure out whether a specific string pattern occurs in a string text. Two of the most widely used pattern matching algorithms are the Naive Algorithm for pattern matching and the pattern matching algorithm using finite automata.
Pattern Matching works by "reading" through text strings to match patterns that are defined using Pattern Matching Expressions, also known as Regular Expressions. Pattern Matching can be used in Identification as well as in Pre-Classification Processing, Page Processing, or Storage Processing.
There is a way to match strings as a list of characters, using a function from SML (which you can write in OCaml) called 'explode' and 'implode' which --respectively -- take a string to a char list and vice versa.
There's a few good papers on compiling pattern matching by some of the people behind OCaml. In particular see Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees and Optimizing Pattern Matching. It might also be useful to go over this stackoverflow post.
118
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
