[TYPES] trace back pattern matching, typecase

[Xavier Leroy]

Burak Emir wrote:

> I am looking for historic references on typecase, pattern matching.

I suspect a great deal of early work on pattern matching was done in
the Lisp community.  Steele and Gabriel's paper "The Evolution of
Lisp" gives some pointers.

> 2) For typecase, it is much less clear to me what one could reference as
> first emergence. Modula-3 comes to my mind. It is probably helpful to
> narrow my query to statically typed languages at this point.

The paper "Dynamic Typing in a Statically Typed Language" by Abadi,
Cardelli, Pierce and Plotkin lists SIMULA-67 and CLU as early examples
of typecase.  There is also Cardelli's Amber language, which predates
(and probably inspired) Modula-3's typecase.

Hope this helps,

- Xavier Leroy