When Python 3.10 introduced structural pattern matching (match/case syntax), there was an excitement and confusion in the community. In first days, I was one of those confused people (confused of other people's excitement). I was looking at match/case in Python as something similar to switch/case in other languages: a glorified if-elif-else chain. But soon I realized it as a much more powerful feature than simple switch/case.
Now that we have reached a point where all minimum Python versions with active support is 3.10, I thought I can give it a try to use match/case in my codes. But as soon as I started using this syntax, I started realising it has a much deeper links to the language syntax than I thought. In this post, I want to tell you about these findings.
Literal patterns – the first taste
Let’s start with a trivial match on a constant values:
x = 1
