Project

General

Profile

Actions

Feature #16372

closed

Allow pattern matching to bind instance variables

Added by jnchito (Junichi Ito) over 4 years ago. Updated over 4 years ago.

Status:
Rejected
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:95954]

Description

I tried this code, but got sytax error:

case [1, 2]
in @a, @b
end
syntax error, unexpected instance variable, expecting '}'
    in @a, @b
       ^~

I think it would be more useful if we could bind instance variables with pattern matching.

Use case

I understand this is not Rails way, but we have some codes like this:

def Foo.create_foo(params)
  if valid?(params)
    [:ok, create(params)]
  else
    [:ng, nil]
  end
end

class FooController < ApplicationController
  def create
    result, @foo = Foo.create_foo(foo_params)

    case result
    when :ok
      redirect_to @foo
    when :ng
      # @foo will be used in view
      render :new
    else
      raise "Unknown result: #{result}"
    end
  end
end

I thought I could make it simpler with pattern matching (but impossible):

class FooController < ApplicationController
  def create
    case Foo.create_foo(foo_params)
    in :ok, @foo
      redirect_to @foo
    in :ng, _
      render :new
    end
  end
end

Related issues 1 (0 open1 closed)

Related to Ruby master - Feature #18408: Allow pattern match to set instance variablesRejectedktsj (Kazuki Tsujimoto)Actions

Updated by shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) over 4 years ago

If I understood you correctly then the suggestion is to allow both local and
instance variables become assignable, when before pattern matching would only
be possible to local variables, yes?

If that is the case then I think this might make sense, since we can assign
to local variables and instance variables as-is, so that would seem logical
to have pattern matching work on instance variables as well. It might be
useful to ask the ruby user who suggested pattern matching too about this,
perhaps there was a reason @variables were not considered (but it could
simply be that he did not think about it at all when suggesting the
feature).

Updated by jnchito (Junichi Ito) over 4 years ago

shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) wrote:

If I understood you correctly then the suggestion is to allow both local and
instance variables become assignable, when before pattern matching would only
be possible to local variables, yes?

Yes, correct. And people might want to use @@variables and $variables too (I rarely use them, though) .

Updated by matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto) over 4 years ago

  • Status changed from Open to Rejected

Extending pattern variables to non-local variables would make pattern-matching more complex and confusing. I reject the idea (at least for now). There might be a chance to make pinned variables (^a) to pinned expression in the future.

Matz.

Actions #4

Updated by ktsj (Kazuki Tsujimoto) about 2 years ago

  • Related to Feature #18408: Allow pattern match to set instance variables added
Actions

Also available in: Atom PDF

Like0
Like0Like0Like0Like0