Agreed regarding the "or" - rejecting consistency here just because other languages do it differently is weird. > it's not clear what it makes more succinct th

Agreed regarding the "or" - rejecting consistency here just because other languages do it differently is weird. > it's not clear what it makes more succinct than the equivalent `elif` statements But pattern matching is shorter than if-else in many cases and can actually differentiate between structures which makes it very flexible. It's like switch-case should have been from the start imho. As an example, in Rust I often do comparisons between certain values by simply matching a tuple of them: match (foo, bar) { (x, x) => true, // foo == bar (Foo::VariantA(42), _) => unreachable!(), // has to be a bug (Foo::VariantA(a), _) => a < 0, _ => false, } This is of course a rather simple example, but I hope it still conveys what I like so much about this kind of feature. It doesn't do more than an if-else chain, but under the right circumstances it really shines. Just like list comprehensions don't add any new functionality, but the filtering and mapping features are often simply more expressive for what you want to do. Although I'm not sure what to think of Python's preference to put the condition and code in different lines; maybe that's optional, which could make it more succinct when the situation permits it.