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In Swift, switch is my new favorite tool, combined with Swift's enums and amazingly strong native pattern matching. It has absolutely changed how I write code,

In Swift, switch is my new favorite tool, combined with Swift's enums and amazingly strong native pattern matching. It has absolutely changed how I write code, and makes me wish it were a tool I could reach for whenever I'm working in another language. Some examples: http://austinzheng.com/2014/12/16/swift-pattern-matching-switch/ http://austinzheng.com/2014/12/16/swift-pattern-matching-swi...

paultopia 8y ago
Came here to say this. Many of the complaints about switch statements are about classic, kinda terrible, implementations of switch statements. Swift gets that right. Like, really super right.
ken 8y ago
I'm conflicted. Swift's switch is powerful, but it's also complex, and even after using it for years, I still have to occasionally look up the syntax for some variant. Other HLLs have other ways of accomplishing these tasks that work just as well. The whole language feels like they crammed every possible feature into every other feature, as a cartesian product of syntax, rather than as Lisp or Tcl or Forth does, with simple syntax that's flexible so everything naturally works everywhere. Someone even made an http://fuckingifcaseletsyntax.com http://fuckingifcaseletsyntax.com for Swift, so I don't think I'm alone here. You can really see the C legacy by the name and overall structure. I still miss the simplicity and flexibility of COND, and :keywords. It's nice that Swift can identify unhandled enum cases, I guess, but I can't say that's ever been a problem I've run into. Most of the examples here I would prefer to write as a dictionary literal (more declarative), or possibly a method on the enum (easy in Swift). It's only single-dispatch, but it's still much better than burying functionality inside single-use, untestable switch statements in the middle of a func. If something is useful enough to justify writing 8 or 10 lines of code to handle a set of cases, then I guarantee I'm going to want to evaluate it in the debugger next week. The older I get, the less Turing-complete code I want to write. Code is a liability. Constant tables are pure value. Switch, then, is the worst: it takes something which looks very much like a constant table, and forces it to be code.

paultopia 8y ago

Came here to say this. Many of the complaints about switch statements are about classic, kinda terrible, implementations of switch statements. Swift gets that right. Like, really super right.

ken 8y ago

I'm conflicted. Swift's switch is powerful, but it's also complex, and even after using it for years, I still have to occasionally look up the syntax for some variant. Other HLLs have other ways of accomplishing these tasks that work just as well. The whole language feels like they crammed every possible feature into every other feature, as a cartesian product of syntax, rather than as Lisp or Tcl or Forth does, with simple syntax that's flexible so everything naturally works everywhere. Someone even made an http://fuckingifcaseletsyntax.com http://fuckingifcaseletsyntax.com for Swift, so I don't think I'm alone here. You can really see the C legacy by the name and overall structure. I still miss the simplicity and flexibility of COND, and :keywords. It's nice that Swift can identify unhandled enum cases, I guess, but I can't say that's ever been a problem I've run into. Most of the examples here I would prefer to write as a dictionary literal (more declarative), or possibly a method on the enum (easy in Swift). It's only single-dispatch, but it's still much better than burying functionality inside single-use, untestable switch statements in the middle of a func. If something is useful enough to justify writing 8 or 10 lines of code to handle a set of cases, then I guarantee I'm going to want to evaluate it in the debugger next week. The older I get, the less Turing-complete code I want to write. Code is a liability. Constant tables are pure value. Switch, then, is the worst: it takes something which looks very much like a constant table, and forces it to be code.