Kuldeepak Gupta shows off pattern matching in Scala:
Pattern Matching is a mechanism of checking a value against a Pattern. It gives a way of checking the given sequence of tokens for the presence of a specific pattern. Here, we match expressions against a pattern.
Compared to the ‘switch’ in C++, C, JAVA, there’s no fall through to the next alternative in Scala pattern matching. A Match error is thrown when no pattern matches.
This is a powerful part of functional programming.