text: Non-free data types are data types whose data have no canonical forms. For example, multisets are non-free data types because the multiset @math has two other equivalent but literally different forms @math and @math . Pattern matching is known to provide a handy tool set to treat such data types. Although many studies on pattern matching and implementations for practical programming languages have been proposed so far, we observe that none of these studies satisfy all the criteria of practical pattern matching, which are as follows: i) efficiency of the backtracking algorithm for non-linear patterns, ii) extensibility of matching process, and iii) polymorphism in patterns. This paper aims to design a new pattern-matching-oriented programming language that satisfies all the above three criteria. The proposed language features clean Scheme-like syntax and efficient and extensible pattern matching semantics. This programming language is especially useful for the processing of complex non-free data types that not only include multisets and sets but also graphs and symbolic mathematical expressions. We discuss the importance of our criteria of practical pattern matching and how our language design naturally arises from the criteria. The proposed language has been already implemented and open-sourced as the Egison programming language.
  @cite_1: Graph algorithms expressed in functional languages often suffer from their inherited imperative, state-based style. In particular, this impedes formal program manipulation. We show how to model persistent graphs in functional languages by graph constructors. This provides a decompositional view of graphs which is very close to that of data types and leads to a "more fictional" formulation of graph algorithms. Graph constructors enable the definition of general fold operations for graphs. We present a promotion theorem for one of these folds that allows program fusion and the elimination of intermediate results. Fusion is not restricted to the elimination of tree-like structures, and we prove another theorem that facilitates the elimination of intermediate graphs. We describe an ML-implementation of persistent graphs which efficiently supports the presented fold operators. For example, depth-first-search expressed by a fold over a functional graph has the same complexity as the corresponding imperative algorithm.
  @cite_13: 
  @cite_12: Pattern matching of algebraic data types (ADTs) is a standard feature in typed functional programming languages, but it is well known that it interacts poorly with abstraction. While several partial solutions to this problem have been proposed, few have been implemented or used. This paper describes an extension to the .NET language F# called active patterns, which supports pattern matching over abstract representations of generic heterogeneous data such as XML and term structures, including where these are represented via object models in other .NET languages. Our design is the first to incorporate both ad hoc pattern matching functions for partial decompositions and "views" for total decompositions, and yet remains a simple and lightweight extension. We give a description of the language extension along with numerous motivating examples. Finally we describe how this feature would interact with other reasonable and related language extensions: existential types quantified at data discrimination tags, GADTs, and monadic generalizations of pattern matching.
summary: Active patterns @cite_13 @cite_12 provides a method to decompose non-free data. In active patterns, users define a for each pattern to specify how to decompose non-free data. For example, insert for multisets is defined as a match function in @cite_13 . An example of pattern matching against graphs using matching function is also shown in @cite_1 . One limitation of active patterns is that it does not support backtracking in the pattern matching process. In active patterns, the values bound to pattern variables are fixed in order from the left to right of a pattern. Therefore, we cannot write non-linear patterns that requires backtracking such as a pattern that matches with a collection (like sets or multisets) that contains two identical elements. (The pattern matching fails if we unfortunately pick an element that appears more than twice at the first choice.)