[tannhaeuser]

I believe Erlang inherited its pattern matching from Prolog term unification since Erlang was prototyped as a DSL using Prolog's op built-in predicate (plus other Prolog parsing DSLs such as definite clause grammars).

[1]: http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?predicate=op%2f3

[jerf]

Heh, OK, Erlang was built for pattern matching from... uhh... the water table up? The mantle up? :)