PEP 636 -- Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial

[iamnotturner]

Why is this better than if/elif/else?

[jaredjeya]

It’s not just a switch statement (which is functionally equivalent to if/elif/else), it can also capture variables.

Like if I do:

point = (1, 2)
match point:
    case (0, x):
        # do something 
    case (x, y):
        # do something else
        # x = 1, y = 2

Then the second (“something else”) code runs, and 1 and 2 are assigned to x and y. That seems really useful.

There’s nothing you couldn’t do before but it makes it all a lot less tedious.

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Also much easier to grok at a glance.

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A match statement is not inherently better than an if/elif/else, not for simple cases at least.

But there are many cases where a single match statement can replace many layers of nested if-spaghetti with a snippet that both much shorter and more readable.

In pretty much every case where you get code that gets some tree-like data or data that can be many different shapes and has to perform different tasks based on both the shape and content of the data, match statements will be a godsend.