The next release of Ceylon features an interesting range of new language features, including constructors, if and switch expression, let and object expressions, and destructuring of tuples and entries. In this post, I'm going to describe our new syntax for destructuring.

A destructuring statement looks a lot like a normal value declaration, except that where we would expect to see the value name, a pattern occurs instead.

An entry pattern is indicated using the skinny arrow -> we use to construct entries:

String->Integer entry = "one"->1; value key->item = entry; //destructure the Entry

A tuple pattern is indicated with brackets:

[String,Integer] pair = ["one",1]; value [first,second] = pair; //destructure the Tuple

The pattern variables, key , item , first , and second are just regular local values.

We can nest tuple and entry patterns:

String->[String,Integer] entry = "one"->["one",1]; value key->[first,second] = entry;

A tuple pattern may have a tail variable, indicated with a * :

[String+] ints = 1..100; value [first,*rest] = ints; //destructure the Sequence

(This syntax resembles the spread operator.)

Patterns may optionally indicate an explicit type:

value String key->[String first, Integer second] = entry;

Pattern-based destructuring can occur in a number of other places in the language. A pattern can occur in a for loop:

for ([x, y] in points) { ... } for (key->item in map) { ... }

Or in an exists or nonempty condition:

if (exists index->item = stream.indexed.first) { ... } if (nonempty [first,*rest] = sequence) { ... }

Or in a let expression:

value dist = let ([x,y] = point) sqrt(x^2+y^2);

You might wonder why we decided to introduce this syntax, or at least, why we decided to do it now. Well, I suppose the simple answer is that it always felt a bit incomplete or unfinished to have a language with tuples but no convenient destructuring syntax for them. Especially when we did already have destructuring for entries, but only in for , as a special case.

But looking into the future, you could also choose to see this as us dipping our toes in the water of eventual support for pattern matching. I remain ambivalent about pattern matching, and it's certainly not something we find that the language is missing or needs, but lots of folks tell us they like it in other languages, so we're keeping our options open. Fortunately, the syntax described above will scale nicely to more complex patterns in a full pattern matching facility.

This functionality is already implemented and available in github.

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