Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just check out the paper's Motivaton section (2). In ML you can't write something like this: if e is ... Lit(value) and Map.find_opt(value) is Some(result) then Some(result) ... where the `...` may include many cases and may contain other Lit cases, so that you would need to refactor the whole expression. Haskell's pattern guards can do this, but they can't "split" control-flow in the middle of a case, as in: Lit(val…
PS: there's another point being made on Reddit about cond's right-shift problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1g127...
The limitations of Elixir syntax means it would need to be something more like:
ucs do
expensive() =>
and cheap1() -> "branch 1",
and cheap2() -> "branch 2",
cheap3() -> "branch 3"
end
There are other ways around it, but it could be fun to try to build a macro in Elixir for the UCS.