Primitive type patterns

Brian Goetz brian.goetz at oracle.com
Thu Apr 7 19:54:11 UTC 2022


There's another, probably stronger, reason why primitive patterns 
supporting widening, narrowing, boxing, unboxing, etc, are basically a 
forced move, besides alignment with `let` statements, discussed earlier:

> There is another constraint on primitive type patterns: the let/bind 
> statement coming down the road.  Because a type pattern looks (not 
> accidentally) like a local variable declaration, a let/bind we will 
> want to align the semantics of "local variable declaration with 
> initializer" and "let/bind with total type pattern". Concretely:
>
>     let String s = "foo";
>
> is a pattern match against the (total) pattern `String s`, which 
> introduces `s` into the remainder of the block.  Since let/bind is a 
> generalization of local variable declaration with initialization, 
> let/bind should align with locals where the two can express the same 
> thing.  This means that the set of conversions allowed in assignment 
> context (JLS 5.2) should also be supported by type patterns.

The other reason is the duality with constructors (and eventually, 
methods).  if we have a record:

      record R(int x, Long l) { }

we can construct an R with

     new R(int, Long)               // no adaptation
     new R(Integer, Long)       // unbox x
     new R(short, Long)          // widen x
     new R(int, long)               // box y

Deconstruction patterns are the dual of constructors; we should be able 
to deconstruct an R with:

     case R(int x, Long l)                // no adaptation
     case R(Integer x, Long l)        // box x
     case R(short s, Long l)           // range check
     case R(int x, long l)                // unbox y, null check

So the set of adaptations in method invocation context should align with 
those in nested patterns, too.

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