[Python-Dev] Switch statement (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Sat Jun 24 17:03:17 CEST 2006

Josiah Carlson wrote:

This is a good thing, because if switch/case ends up functionally identical to if/elif/else, then it has no purpose as a construct.

there's no shortage of Python constructs that are functionally identical to existing constructs. as with all syntactic "sugar", the emphasis should be on what the programmer wants to express, not how you can artificially constrain the implementation to make the new thing slightly different from what's already in there.

and the point of switch/case is to be able to say "I'm going to dispatch on a single value" in a concise way; the rest is optimizations.

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