Thank you for the pointer! I grabbed this pdf, and (by random chance) my eyes fell upon this somewhat-related gem (on page 129): "Ironically, pattern matching

Thank you for the pointer! I grabbed this pdf, and (by random chance) my eyes fell upon this somewhat-related gem (on page 129): "Ironically, pattern matching — one of the most popular features in functional programming languages — is also one of the biggest obstacles to the widespread use of efficient functional data structures. The problem is that pattern matching can only be performed on data structures whose representation is known, yet the basic software-engineering principle of abstraction tells us that the representation of non-trivial data structures should be hidden. The seductive allure of pattern matching leads many functional programmers to abandon sophisticated data structures in favor of simple, known representations such as lists, even when doing so causes an otherwise linear algorithm to explode to quadratic or even exponential time." http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf