Discussion on: How to eliminate if-else chain, for long life software

[Patrick Elsen]

Rust has a nice match statement too, even though it is not functional.

match person {
    Person::Employee(employee) if employee.years() > 3 => true,
    Person::Employee(employee) if employee.age() >63 => true,
    Person::Intern(internet) if intern.name().first() == 'S' => true,
    _ => false
}

I believe it is something that most functional language have and newer languages are starting to adopt it.

[Swastik Baranwal]

Almost every modern language have pattern matching.

[Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard]

Tree patterns are used in some programming languages as a general tool to process data based on its structure, e.g. C#,[1] F#,[2] Haskell,[3] ML, Python,[4] Ruby,[5] Rust,[6] Scala,[7] Swift[8] and the symbolic mathematics language Mathematica have special syntax for expressing tree patterns and a language construct for conditional execution and value retrieval based on it.

Pattern matching

In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking a given sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. In contrast to pattern recognition, the match usually has to be exact: "either it will or will not be a match." The patterns generally have the form of either sequences or tree structures. Uses of pattern matching include outputting the locations of a pattern within a token sequence, to output some component of the matched pattern, and to substitute the matching pattern with some other token sequence.

View on Wikipedia

[Dr Nicole Jacqueline Martin]

The techniques above are called pattern matching. I wrote an article about it here:
dev.to/n1ckdm/pattern-matching-dec...

[Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard]

Really good article thanks
Not that Kotlin when is not true pattern matching found in more fiftieth languages, it's a better switch case. Combined with static types and algebraic types it's 80% of that though

[Matthew Daly]

Newer versions of PHP have match.