Programming Praxis

We implemented Chris Okasaki’s physicist’s queues in the previous exercise. As I implemented them in Scheme, I struggled to maintain Okasaki’s clear, consise coding style, which relies heavily on pattern matching. There are several pattern-matching libraries available for Scheme, but they are rather heavy (the one I use, by Friedman, Hilsdale and Dybvig, is over six hundred lines of code). Our Standard Prelude has a simple pattern matcher, but it doesn’t fit properly with a simple binding. I finally came up with a strange method using let-values ... apply values that makes the code concise at the cost of forcing readers to think through an uncommon idiom. What I wanted was something similar to the destructuring-bind macro of Common Lisp.

So I wrote one.

Your task is to write a macro similar to the destructuring-bind macro of Common Lisp and add it to your favorite programming language. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution in the comments below.

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