Playing with Scala’s pattern matching
François Sarradin writes:
How many times have you been stuck in your frustration because you were unable to use strings as entries in switch-case statements. Such an ability would be really useful for example to analyze the arguments of your application or to parse a file, or any content of a string. Meanwhile, you have to write a series of if-else-if statements (and this is annoying). Another solution is to use a hash map, where the keys are those strings and values are the associated reified processes, for example a Runnable or a Callable in Java (but this is not really natural, long to develop, and boring too).
If a switch-case statement that accepts strings as entries would be a revolution for you, the Scala’s pattern matching says that this is not enough! Indeed, there are other cases where a series of if-else-if statements would be generously transformed into a look-alike switch-case statement. For example, it would be really nice to simplify a series of instanceof and cast included in if-else-if to execute the good process according to the type of a parameter.
In this post, we see the power of the Scala’s pattern matching in different use cases.
What language you choose for topic map development is going to depend upon its pattern matching abilities.
Here’s a chance to evaluate Scala in that regard.