Learning Haskell - Pattern matching

In my last post about Learning Haskell, I’ve explained a little bit about the rules for recursion, and as an example, a factorial recursive function. We can implement that factorial function in many ways, for instance, with Pattern Matching.

Read the other posts of this serie:

What is Pattern matching?

Pattern matching is a way to take some value and match it against some pattern. In other words, Pattern matching give us the ability to recognize values and break these values into parts.

Factorial revisited (with Pattern matching)

To rewrite the factorial function with Pattern matching, let’s look to the factorial function from my last post:

-- Factorial function - recursive version
factorial n =
  if n < 2
    then 1
    else n * factorial (n - 1)

The condition is that if the number (n) is smaller than 2, we return 1, (that’s the factorial rule) otherwise, we return the number (n) times the factorial function.

By the rule above, we can start our factorial function using Pattern matching like this:

-- Factorial function - Pattern matching version
-- Matching the first case
factorial 0 = 1

And then we repeat the process for all the other conditions, for the second case, where the number (n) is 1:

-- Factorial function - Pattern matching version
-- Matching the second case
factorial 0 = 1
factorial 1 = 1

Finally, for the last case where the number (n) is any number equal or greater than 2:

-- Factorial function - Pattern matching version
-- Matching the second case
factorial 0 = 1
factorial 1 = 1
factorial n = n * factorial (n - 1)

That’s all!

Pattern matching forces you to declare all the scenario, making your code more readable. 😃