Pattern matching will be familiar to anyone coming from a Haskell background, however it might look a bit weird at first for anyone coming from imperative languages.

Pattern matching in it’s most basic form, can look like an extended switch, with some differences:

• The match keyword comes after the variable (selection match compared to switch(selection)
• There is no need for break;
• There is no fall through
• default case is case _ (or case x where x can be any lower case identifier, more about it in the next slides)

Pattern matching can be very powerful beyond a switch replacement, and will be explained in later slides

See Also opens in new page

• More on pattern mathing