I mostly ignored Python until my job required it, about 8 years ago. Coming from Erlang, I was pleasantly astonished to find that I could use tuple pattern matching in function headers… until I discovered that was dropped in Python 3 and I had been using the mostly-dead version 2 runtime.
I think I'd call this destructuring, as opposed to patterns and matches, and Python still does it, just not in the function head.
I do wish they went the opposite direction and made the feature better instead of keeping it as a weird assignment thing in the body. The match statement is a similarly unfortunate solution, in my opinion.
I looked at Erlang and it is closest to the Prolog idea (clearly because Erlang was originally implemented in Prolog). Other languages are not really what I mean by pattern matching, the matching should go on the selection of functions to apply to a particular parameter expression. In the compiled world, C++ is the one that gets closest to this behavior. Python would be able to do it due to its dynamic nature, but for some reason it decided not to implement this feature.
