I've found it quite useful in Clojure/Script and I'm sure folks who have
encountered the feature in the ML derived languages would agree.
Indeed, all of the pattern-match-supporting functional languages
I've used also supported 'as'-patterns in some form ('var@pat' in
Haskell, 'var as pat' in SML and variants, 'pat=pat' in Erlang,
'as pat var' in (little-known) KiR).
Those constructs are hard to search for on github (too many
false matches, though searching for 'as' in Standard ML code
might work), but I find them both useful and popular.
Some of the usefulness comes from using pattern matching
as a structural guard (checking the substructure conforms to
a pattern, then just naming the substructure wholesale). I
have no experience with a language that only destructures,
without matching, but I would expect to use as-patterns
with destructuring as well, increasingly so with upcoming
language constructs.
The main problems seem to be cover-grammars (construct
should be valid expression and pattern), and that the obvious
choice '=' is already taken for default parameters.
A common generalization of as-patterns are conjunctive
patterns (as in Successor ML or Erlang), which suggests
'pat&&pat' or perhaps '(pat,pat)' as alternative syntax.
Claus
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