Martin Odersky illustrates this very same problem in his scala course very well: https://class.coursera.org/progfun-002 https://class.coursera.org/progfun-002

Martin Odersky illustrates this very same problem in his scala course very well: https://class.coursera.org/progfun-002 https://class.coursera.org/progfun-002 Lecture 4.5 Decomposition Lecture 4.6 Pattern matching (ps. I am not associated with Coursera or Martin in any way, just found his particular explanations very easy to understand) Edit: formatting