F# 4.0 Design Patterns

Grouping patterns

Pattern match cases I've covered until this point can be composed together in a manner that resembles the terms of a Boolean expression with OR (|) and AND (&) operators. Let me demonstrate this technique by implementing a function that accepts two string arguments that represent keys and validates that both the given values are non-empty, providing a detailed diagnostics.

You should be able to grasp at this point why I should begin the matching with the most specific case when both the keys are empty. The next less specific match is represented by two symmetric cases when either the first or the second key is empty. Here, in order to demonstrate the flexibility provided by F# patterns grouping, I combine these two patterns with ...