[frou_dh]

I really like that Ruby throws NoMatchingPatternError if none of the patterns match. It's a bit like the much-acclaimed exhaustive pattern matching in static languages (though at runtime rather than compile-time, obviously) and better than just silently falling off the end, which IIRC is what Python's pattern matching does.

[rusk]

In Python you can terminate a for loop with else, which will be run whenever the loop runs to the end without breaking

[frou_dh]

That's not particularly relevant to the nice pattern matching property I mentioned. If you need to manually write supplementary code to get the exhaustiveness safety then that's back into the realm of bog-standard defensive programming.

Here's what I mean. The Ruby will throw NoMatchingPatternError and the Python will silently do nothing.

    x = [10, "figs"]

    case x
    in [n, "apples"]
      :foo
    in [n, "oranges"]
      :bar
    end

    # ---

    x = [10, "figs"]

    match x:
        case [n, "apples"]:
                ...
        case [n, "oranges"]:
                ...

[rusk]

You can use ‘case _’ in that case … it’s not a big deal to opt into this default behaviour.

[frou_dh]

I know, that's why I mentioned the manual part. What I'm getting from this exchange is that Python is your team and no criticism can be allowed to stand.

[rusk]

No I’m just trying to add substance to the discussion.

I like Ruby but I wouldn’t use it for the things I use Python for.

[specialist]

Neat. Will check it out.

I recently spotted a (new to me) foreach / else construct in a templating language (sorry, forget which one); else is invoked if the list is empty. Nice sugar for common outputs like "no items found".

I appreciate modest syntactic sugar.

For instance, my #1 sugar wish is for Java's foreach is to do nothing when the list reference is null. Versus tossing a NPE.

Eliminates an unnecessary null check and makes the world a little bit more null-safe.

[rusk]

> else is invoked if the list is empty.

for / else should do that too …