A few weeks ago I was watching this talk. The speaker persuaded everybody to check out Erlang. I already heard about this language because of it’s concurrency paradigms, so I thought to give it a try.

After browsing thru the specs I found an interesting construct: Pattern and Guard.

It reminded me a little of my Duck class that I wrote for BehaveAS. Th idea behind Duck was to define expectation return value in a simple internal DSL manner.
So for example I am expecting that an array will have three entries and I am only interested in second item. Or a better example when I expect an exception with a certain error id. It’s quite complicated to do this stuff without Duck .

Here is an example of use:

package {
  import mz.behaveas.model.ducktype.Duck;
  import flash.display.Sprite;
 
  public class DuckTypeTest extends Sprite {
    public function DuckTypeTest() {
      var a : * = 23;
      var duck : Duck = Duck.type({_type_:String, toString:"23"});
      if(!duck.equals(a)){
      	trace((duck.getReport()));
      }
      var a1 : Array = [1,2,3,"asd"];
      var duck1 : Duck = Duck.type({1:2, 3:Duck.type({_type_:String,toUpperCase:"ASD"})});
      if(!duck1.equals(a1)){
      	trace((duck1.getReport()));
      }
    }
  }
}

As you can see you can also check methods for those return values (but only if those methods doesn’t need parameters ).

So back to Erlang, Pattern and Guards. I thought it would be a great idea to use Duck as a Guard for input parameters in a function.

function foo(a: Array):void{
  var matcher : Duck = Duck.type({length:3});
  if(!matcher.equals(a)){
    return;
  }
  trace(a[2]);
}

But I am not sure about performance!