Do you know Prolog? It sounds like it might appeal to you. Rather than evaluating expressions, it does pattern matching (unification, really) on data structures

Do you know Prolog? It sounds like it might appeal to you. Rather than evaluating expressions, it does pattern matching (unification, really) on data structures, rewriting and evaluating them as specified. It can pass around uninstantiated variables and do depth-first search* through known facts/rules to find complete matches, backtracking when it hits dead ends or alternative solutions are requested. Rather than saying Prolog has pattern matching, it almost makes more sense to say it is pattern matching. It's very central to its model of computation. * Breadth-first and other search techniques are easy to write, depth-first is just the default.