> "when Vowel" is not very different to bog standard switch-statement magic. Actually in this case it looks like Cobol is almost doing a kind of pattern matchin

> "when Vowel" is not very different to bog standard switch-statement magic. Actually in this case it looks like Cobol is almost doing a kind of pattern matching. It is, but the "magic" is that the pattern-matching is part of the variable declaration, so you can reuse those patterns wherever you can use the variable.