I think of full-featured pattern matching as a fairly recent addition even to Lisp. Lisp has had some pattern-matching constructs forever of course (cond, destr

I think of full-featured pattern matching as a fairly recent addition even to Lisp. Lisp has had some pattern-matching constructs forever of course (cond, destructuring-bind, Norvig's sexp matcher from PAIP [1], etc.). But it's only with the more recent emergence of optima [2] as a de-facto standard that it now has really good pattern matching. It was probably the #1 thing I missed in Lisp, after having used ML a bit, until optima came along. [1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/master/lisp/patmatch.lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/master/lisp/patmatc... [2] https://github.com/m2ym/optima https://github.com/m2ym/optima