Pattern Matching

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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?

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: