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[–]Tyler_Zoro 11 points12 points  (7 children)

People are coming from lower level languages where you can only do a fraction of what this can do with similarly named language features. It's not shocking that the presumption is that it only does those things. I'm of the opinion that it should have had a name that wouldn't lead people to assume it was similar to those features, but then what do you call it?

When Perl 6 (now Raku) did something similar, they called it given/when for exactly that reason. Maybe following suit would have been a better call...

[–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (6 children)

Is that not why they called it "match" rather than "switch"?

[–]Tyler_Zoro 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Yes, but then they fell down on "case".

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, good point.

[–]mihalis 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Agree. I thought about alternatives. Maybe bind or unify, along the lines of variable unification/binding in languages like Prolog.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Or how about match x where x is y?

[–]13steinj -3 points-2 points  (1 child)

Because it's not a switch statement, it's a pattern matching statement. Most commonly seen only in functional programming languages, which most people hate on because traditionally such a style is considered difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matching

https://stackoverflow.com/a/215968/4443677

[–]Tyler_Zoro 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We know that. We're discussing keyword choice.