[_delirium]

I think of full-featured pattern matching as a fairly recent addition even to Lisp. Lisp has had some pattern-matching constructs forever of course (cond, destructuring-bind, Norvig's sexp matcher from PAIP [1], etc.). But it's only with the more recent emergence of optima [2] as a de-facto standard that it now has really good pattern matching. It was probably the #1 thing I missed in Lisp, after having used ML a bit, until optima came along.

[1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/master/lisp/patmatc...

[2] https://github.com/m2ym/optima

[lispm]

The first embedded language for programming with patterns for Lisp was implemented 1962 by Daniel Bobrow.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6106