Is it normal to use "case" all the time?

Questions / Help
1

Hello,

I’d like to kindly ask about using case vs. other statements/conditions.

I different languages (all OOP) I used if/else most of the time. I didn’t use case at all mainly because it needed break and I found if/elseif/elseif/elseif/else better readable.

I spent whole weekend on Elixir (great weekend! ;-)) and now I’m looking at my code and:

I used:

  • case approx 50 times
  • if/else 2 times for if x in some_list and if x > 0 and looking at it now I might replace it by multi-clause function
  • cond 1 time for:
cond do
	n > length -> :error
	length == n -> {:ok, ""}
	true ->  {:ok, do_something_with(x)}
end

And everything else is case (not counting guard clauses/pattern matching in function arguments).

I even used case for stupid things like

case value do
    [] -> :error
    value -> {:ok, value}
end

Can anyone please tell me is this normal in Elixir or am I crazy / crazy love with case ?

P.S. this looks like funny joke question :wink: but it’s actually real and serious questions.

Kind regards,

Mat

2 Likes
2

Yes, pattern matching is the favored way of doing conditionals in elixir, so it is absolutely normal to use much more case/2 and function head pattern matching than it is to use an if/2 (which at the end is a macro which expands to a case/2 anyway).

3 Likes
3

I had a similar experience/revelation as you on this point when starting with Elixir. Next step is to wonder at the marvel of with and realize you have written your last nested conditional.

4

Thank you NobbZ and tfwright.

@tfwright Funny that you mentioned with. Yesterday for the first time I needed to chain two tuple returning functions and thinking how am I suppose to do that without nesting cases. And I discovered with. For two functions not a big deal but if you have a lot of them… big deal :wink: