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What's the point of pattern matching? Why not just a switch statement?


Switch pivots off of one value, pattern matching allows you to match on types, destructured values, conditional execution based on the existence (or lack thereof) of those values or types. It's much more flexible then switch (but arguably more complex).

See Scala[1] or Swifts[2]'s implementations.

[1] https://docs.scala-lang.org/tour/pattern-matching.html

[2] https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/Patterns.h...




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