Section: New Results

The Negligible and Yet Subtle Cost of Pattern Matching

Participant : Beniamino Accattoli.

This joint work with Bruno Barras (Inria) [31] belongs to line of work Cost Models and Abstract Machines for Functional Languages, supported by the ANR project COCA HOLA.

In this work we extend results about time cost models for the $\lambda$-calculus to a larger language, namely the $\lambda$-calculus with constructors and pattern matching. We consider all natural evaluation strategies, that is, call-by-name, call-by-value, and call-by-need.

The results are expected, and considered folklore, but we show that the question is subtler than it seems at first sight, by exhibiting some counter-example for naive formulations of the extensions. The, we show the actual results for the right extensions.