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Discussion on: Ruby – Pattern Matching – Second Impressions

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edisonywh profile image
Edison Yap

Wow, that was really hard to understand!

I'm sure whoever made this happen had put in a lot of effort, but as you said, I don't think it's ideal to just shoehorn a feature in when it doesn't fit in.

By the way, with a quick glance on your snippets below, it looks like what you're asking for isn't really just pattern matching, but rather method overload.

I know Crystal has it which looks pretty cool!

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

From what I know about Crystal, it has method overload only by types (much like Java). And hear it would be possible to also "overload" by particular values - for example different method for hash containing a key "success".

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edisonywh profile image
Edison Yap

Correct, that's what overloading means - defining methods with same name but with different method signatures, and method signatures are usually types & arity.

What you're referring to (in Elixir) is a combination of both - when you have pattern matching, your method signatures aren't just types & arity, but also patterns.