Yes, good point, but this was not meant to be an example of declarative paradigm, just functional paradigm. It's SML, which is not a particularly declarative la

Yes, good point, but this was not meant to be an example of declarative paradigm, just functional paradigm. It's SML, which is not a particularly declarative language. Haskell is a little bit more declarative but AFAIK its pattern matching works the same way as SML.