Encoding ADT's robustly

[rehno-lindeque]

Hi! I noticed that roy uses 'instanceof' quite pervasively, especially for pattern-matching ADT's.

Instanceof tends to have trouble when doing cross-framescripting and I suspect also in webworkers etc.

One possible solution is to leverage the internal [[CLASS]] property instead as suggested by various by people around the web:

http://perfectionkills.com/instanceof-considered-harmful-or-how-to-write-a-robust-isarray/
http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/fixing-the-javascript-typeof-operator/
http://tobyho.com/2011/01/28/checking-types-in-javascript/

However, there is also the problem of serializing ADT's to JSON, which I think will be pretty common when communicating with a remote server. I'd like to suggest perhaps considering an encoding that includes the constructors?
E.g. Possibly something in the style of

with

data NestedADT = NestedConstructor Number
data ADT = Constructor Number Number NestedADT

then this

let adt = Constructor 0 1 (NestedConstructor 2)

might be represented as

{ ADT_Constructor: [ 0, 1, { NestedADT_NestedConstructor: [ 2 ] } ] } 

or perhaps differentiating between constructors that take multiple arguments and constructors that take a single argument

{ ADT_Constructor: [ 0, 1, { NestedADT_NestedConstructor: 2 } ] } 

on the other hand, simply using arrays might be faster?

[ "ADT_Constructor", 0, 1, [ "NestedADT_NestedConstructor", 2 ] ] ] 

...in which case the code to match the nested constructors might need to do something like

Array.isArray(adt[3]) && adt[3][0] === "NestedADT_NestedConstructor" 

Which I suspect should also be pretty efficient given that Array.isArray is a native function (pure speculation though).

P.S. Perhaps it is useful to support a similar pattern matching mechanism for Lists and ADT's in order to make the generated js look uniform?

e.g.

let lst = [5, 202.2, "matchthis"]
match lst
  case [x, _, "matchthis"] = console.log x "was matched"
  otherwise = console.log "no match"

Cheers,
Rehno

[rtfeldman]

The [[Class]] solution has its own problem, which is that it's only doing string comparison. In contrast, instanceof checks actual references, so it's less prone to false positives.

I propose that serialization and deserialization with type information is not something Roy should try to automate at a language level. Instead, that should be left to libraries such as HydrateJS.