Prism::Pattern

A pattern is an object that wraps a Ruby pattern matching expression. The expression would normally be passed to an in clause within a case expression or a rightward assignment expression. For example, in the following snippet:

case node
in ConstantPathNode[ConstantReadNode[name: :Prism], ConstantReadNode[name: :Pattern]]
end

the pattern is the ConstantPathNode[...] expression.

The pattern gets compiled into an object that responds to call by running the compile method. This method itself will run back through Prism to parse the expression into a tree, then walk the tree to generate the necessary callable objects. For example, if you wanted to compile the expression above into a callable, you would:

callable = Prism::Pattern.new("ConstantPathNode[ConstantReadNode[name: :Prism], ConstantReadNode[name: :Pattern]]").compile
callable.call(node)

The callable object returned by compile is guaranteed to respond to call with a single argument, which is the node to match against. It also is guaranteed to respond to ===, which means it itself can be used in a case expression, as in:

case node
when callable
end

If the query given to the initializer cannot be compiled into a valid matcher (either because of a syntax error or because it is using syntax we do not yet support) then a Prism::Pattern::CompilationError will be raised.