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Remove clause guards.

Open KtorZ opened this issue 4 months ago • 0 comments

What is your idea? Provide a use case.

Clause guards have proven not-so-useful (from surveying the Aiken community and analyzing available open-source repositories). So let's remove them from the language.

Why is it a good idea?

They clutter the codebase and make maintenance harder than it needs to be. Less code means less things that can go wrong.

Besides, they can also be a great footgun, as they usually force the use of wildcard patterns in pattern-matches. Why is this bad? Because it makes code more brittle and fragile on updates since the a wildcard will swallow any modifications made on new constructor variants. Yet, we do generally want compiler warnings in such a scenario to ensure that cases are handled properly when needed.

What is the current alternative and why is it not good enough?

More maintenance.

KtorZ avatar Mar 20 '24 15:03 KtorZ