I really like that Ruby throws NoMatchingPatternError if none of the patterns match. It's a bit like the much-acclaimed exhaustive pattern matching in static languages (though at runtime rather than compile-time, obviously) and better than just silently falling off the end, which IIRC is what Python's pattern matching does.
That's not particularly relevant to the nice pattern matching property I mentioned. If you need to manually write supplementary code to get the exhaustiveness safety then that's back into the realm of bog-standard defensive programming.
Here's what I mean. The Ruby will throw NoMatchingPatternError and the Python will silently do nothing.
x = [10, "figs"]
case x
in [n, "apples"]
:foo
in [n, "oranges"]
:bar
end
# ---
x = [10, "figs"]
match x:
case [n, "apples"]:
...
case [n, "oranges"]:
...
I know, that's why I mentioned the manual part. What I'm getting from this exchange is that Python is your team and no criticism can be allowed to stand.
I recently spotted a (new to me) foreach / else construct in a templating language (sorry, forget which one); else is invoked if the list is empty. Nice sugar for common outputs like "no items found".
I appreciate modest syntactic sugar.
For instance, my #1 sugar wish is for Java's foreach is to do nothing when the list reference is null. Versus tossing a NPE.
Eliminates an unnecessary null check and makes the world a little bit more null-safe.
