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James Briggs
James Briggs

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New Python Match-Case Article

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Python 3.10 is beginning to fill-out with plenty of fascinating new features. One of those, in particular, caught my attention — structural pattern matching — or as most of us will know it, switch/case statements.

Switch-statements have been absent from Python despite being a common feature of most languages.

Back in 2006, PEP 3103 was raised, recommending the implementation of a switch-case statement. However, after a poll at PyCon 2007 received no support for the feature, the Python devs dropped it.

Fast-forward to 2020, and Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, committed the first documentation showing the new switch-statements, which have been named Structural Pattern Matching, as found in PEP 634.

What we have here is much more than a simple switch-case statement, however (hence match-case), as we will see soon.

Let’s take a look at how this new logic works.

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