[Python-ideas] Match statement brainstorm

[Ian Kelly]

On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 10:15 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I guess the tuple structure matching idea is fairly easy to grasp.
>
> The attribute idea would be similar to a duck-type check, though more
> emphasizing data attributes. It would be nice if we could write a
> match that said "if it has attributes x and y, assign those to local
> variables p and q, and ignore other attributes". Strawman syntax could
> be like this:
>
> def demo(arg):
>     switch arg:
>         case (x=p, y=q): print('x=', p, 'y=', q)
>         case (a, b, *_): print('a=', a, 'b=', b)
>         else: print('Too bad')

That the first case would match attributes and not named items seems
surprising to me. That is, just by looking at it I would have expected
it to match {'x': 1, 'y': 2}. This feels more in line with the way
that keyword arguments work, and more consistent with the second case
in that both would be matching contents of collections.