Resources

• Pattern Matching Pointers: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/stelo/pattern.html

Definition

Term pattern matching comes in many variations. The basic problem is that of matching a term pattern (term with variables) against a ground subject term (without variables), producing a substition mapping the variables to the corresponding subterms in the subject term.

More often a subject term is matched against a set of patterns and the matching pattern or patterns has to be found.

Variations

The matching problem problem comes in many different guises. The basic problem considers matching a term at the root

• match term against pattern

• match term against set of patterns; at most one pattern can match

• match term against set of patterns; more than one pattern can match

• match term against ordered sequence of patterns; find the first pattern in the sequence that matches

• for each subterm find out which pattern from a set of patterns matches it

Properties of the patterns

• linear: variable occurs once in pattern

• NonLinearPatternMatching^?: variable may occur mor than once

• LazyPatternMatching^?

• FirstOrderPatternMatching^?

• HigherOrderPatternMatching^?

• SecondOrderPatternMatching^?

• PatternMatchingModuloEquations^?

• StrategicPatternMatching^?

• PatternMatchingAndAbstraction^?

• AdaptivePatternMatching

Implementation

Efficient implementations of pattern matching pre-process the pattern into an efficient automaton that walks the subject tree only once.

References

Here are some references to papers on the subject:

• aTermPatternMatchCompilerInspiredByFiniteAutomataTheory
• AdaptivePatternMatching
• ATypedPatternCalculus