Question

I often hear the phrase, guards are just syntactic sugar for if-then-else (or case statements).

Can somebody please desugar the following instance:

halfOf :: Int -> Int
halfOf x | even x = div x 2

(The function is intentionally partial)

Thanks,

Answer 1

The semantics of pattern matching are defined in the following section of the standard: Formal Semantics of Pattern Matching.

The step that is relevant to your question is c. As you can see, pattern matches with guards of the form

case v of { p | g1 -> e1 ; ...
              | gn -> en where { decls }
            _     -> e' }

Are translated to pattern matches without guards as:

case e' of
{y ->
   case v of {
       p -> let { decls } in
            if g1 then e1 ... else if gn then en else y ;
        _ -> y }}

So pattern guards are defined in terms of if and “fallthrough” is implemented by binding the expression to a variable and then repeating it once in the else clause of the if and then in the pattern that you’d fall through to.

If there is no case to fall through to (as in your example) one will have been inserted by step b, which inserts a default case _ -> error "No match"