I know exactly what you mean. Read this section from the Elixir docs: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html http://elixir-lang.org/getti

I know exactly what you mean. Read this section from the Elixir docs: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/pattern-matching.html Also this page from the Haskell tutorial: https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/patterns.html https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/patterns.html Fun fact: early versions of Erlang (which Elixir is built upon) were implemented in Prolog, and IIRC what would become Erlang later was originally intended to be an extension of Prolog. There are no new ideas.