Match Semantics

The patterns of different case clauses might overlap in that more than one case clause would match a given subject. The first-to-match rule ensures that the selection of a case clause for a given subject is unambiguous. Furthermore, case clauses can have increasingly general patterns matching wider sets of subjects. The first-to-match rule then ensures that the most precise pattern can be chosen (although it is the programmer’s responsibility to order the case clauses correctly).

In a statically typed language, the match statement would be compiled to a decision tree to select a matching pattern quickly and very efficiently. This would, however, require that all patterns be purely declarative and static, running against the established dynamic semantics of Python. The proposed semantics thus represent a path incorporating the best of both worlds: patterns are tried in a strictly sequential order so that each case clause constitutes an actual statement. At the same time, we allow the interpreter to cache any information about the subject or change the order in which subpatterns are tried. In other words: if the interpreter has found that the subject is not an instance of a class C, it can directly skip case clauses testing for this again, without having to perform repeated instance-checks. If a guard stipulates that a variable x must be positive, say (i.e. if x > 0), the interpreter might check this directly after binding x and before any further subpatterns are considered.

Binding and scoping. In many pattern matching implementations, each case clause would establish a separate scope of its own. Variables bound by a pattern would then only be visible inside the corresponding case block. In Python, however, this does not make sense. Establishing separate scopes would essentially mean that each case clause is a separate function without direct access to the variables in the surrounding scope (without having to resort to nonlocal that is). Moreover, a case clause could no longer influence any surrounding control flow through standard statement such as return or break. Hence, such strict scoping would lead to unintuitive and surprising behavior.

A direct consequence of this is that any variable bindings outlive the respective case or match statements. Even patterns that only match a subject partially might bind local variables (this is, in fact, necessary for guards to function properly). However, these semantics for variable binding are in line with existing Python structures such as for loops and with statements.

Guards

Some constraints cannot be adequately expressed through patterns alone. For instance, a ‘less’ or ‘greater than’ relationship defies the usual ‘equal’ semantics of patterns. Moreover, different subpatterns are independent and cannot refer to each other. The addition of guards addresses these restrictions: a guard is an arbitrary expression attached to a pattern and that must evaluate to a “truthy” value for the pattern to succeed.

For example, case [x, y] if x < y: uses a guard (if x < y) to express a ‘less than’ relationship between two otherwise disjoint capture patterns x and y.

From a conceptual point of view, patterns describe structural constraints on the subject in a declarative style, ideally without any side-effects. Recall, in particular, that patterns are clearly distinct from expressions, following different objectives and semantics. Guards then enhance case blocks in a highly controlled way with arbitrary expressions (that might have side effects). Splitting the overall functionality into a static structural and a dynamically evaluated part not only helps with readability, but can also introduce dramatic potential for compiler optimizations. To keep this clear separation, guards are only supported on the level of case clauses and not for individual patterns.

Example using guards:

def sort(seq):
    match seq:
        case [] | [_]:
            return seq
        case [x, y] if x <= y:
            return seq
        case [x, y]:
            return [y, x]
        case [x, y, z] if x <= y <= z:
            return seq
        case [x, y, z] if x >= y >= z:
            return [z, y, x]
        case [p, *rest]:
            a = sort([x for x in rest if x <= p])
            b = sort([x for x in rest if p < x])
            return a + [p] + b

AS Patterns

Patterns fall into two categories: most patterns impose a (structural) constraint that the subject needs to fulfill, whereas the capture pattern binds the subject to a name without regard for the subject’s structure or actual value. Consequently, a pattern can either express a constraint or bind a value, but not both. AS patterns fill this gap in that they allow the user to specify a general pattern as well as capture the subject in a variable.

Typical use cases for the AS pattern include OR and Class patterns together with a binding name as in, e.g., case BinOp('+'|'-' as op, ...): or case [int() as first, int() as second]:. The latter could be understood as saying that the subject must fulfil two distinct pattern: [first, second] as well as [int(), int()]. The AS pattern can thus be seen as a special case of an ‘and’ pattern (see OR patterns below for an additional discussion of ‘and’ patterns).

In an earlier version, the AS pattern was devised as a ‘Walrus pattern’, written as case [first:=int(), second:=int()]. However, using as offers some advantages over :=:

• The walrus operator := is used to capture the result of an expression on the right hand side, whereas as generally indicates some form of ‘processing’ as in import foo as bar or except E as err:. Indeed, the pattern P as x does not assign the pattern P to x, but rather the subject that successfully matches P.
• as allows for a more consistent data flow from left to right (the attributes in Class patterns also follow a left-to-right data flow).
• The walrus operator looks very similar to the syntax for matching attributes in the Class pattern, potentially leading to some confusion.

Example using the AS pattern:

def simplify_expr(tokens):
    match tokens:
        case [('('|'[') as l, *expr, (')'|']') as r] if (l+r) in ('()', '[]'):
            return simplify_expr(expr)
        case [0, ('+'|'-') as op, right]:
            return UnaryOp(op, right)
        case [(int() | float() as left) | Num(left), '+', (int() | float() as right) | Num(right)]:
            return Num(left + right)
        case [(int() | float()) as value]:
            return Num(value)

OR Patterns

The OR pattern allows you to combine ‘structurally equivalent’ alternatives into a new pattern, i.e. several patterns can share a common handler. If any of an OR pattern’s subpatterns matches the subject, the entire OR pattern succeeds.

Statically typed languages prohibit the binding of names (capture patterns) inside an OR pattern because of potential conflicts concerning the types of variables. As a dynamically typed language, Python can be less restrictive here and allow capture patterns inside OR patterns. However, each subpattern must bind the same set of variables so as not to leave potentially undefined names. With two alternatives P | Q, this means that if P binds the variables u and v, Q must bind exactly the same variables u and v.

There was some discussion on whether to use the bar symbol | or the or keyword to separate alternatives. The OR pattern does not fully fit the existing semantics and usage of either of these two symbols. However, | is the symbol of choice in all programming languages with support of the OR pattern and is used in that capacity for regular expressions in Python as well. It is also the traditional separator between alternatives in formal grammars (including Python’s). Moreover, | is not only used for bitwise OR, but also for set unions and dict merging (PEP 584).

Other alternatives were considered as well, but none of these would allow OR-patterns to be nested inside other patterns:

• Using a comma:

  case 401, 403, 404:
      print("Some HTTP error")
  

  This looks too much like a tuple – we would have to find a different way to spell tuples, and the construct would have to be parenthesized inside the argument list of a class pattern. In general, commas already have many different meanings in Python, we shouldn’t add more.

• Using stacked cases:

  case 401:
  case 403:
  case 404:
      print("Some HTTP error")
  

  This is how this would be done in C, using its fall-through semantics for cases. However, we don’t want to mislead people into thinking that match/case uses fall-through semantics (which are a common source of bugs in C). Also, this would be a novel indentation pattern, which might make it harder to support in IDEs and such (it would break the simple rule “add an indentation level after a line ending in a colon”). Finally, this would not support OR patterns nested inside other patterns, either.

• Using “case in” followed by a comma-separated list:

  case in 401, 403, 404:
      print("Some HTTP error")
  

  This would not work for OR patterns nested inside other patterns, like:

  case Point(0|1, 0|1):
      print("A corner of the unit square")
  

AND and NOT Patterns

Since this proposal defines an OR-pattern (|) to match one of several alternates, why not also an AND-pattern (&) or even a NOT-pattern (!)? Especially given that some other languages (F# for example) support AND-patterns.

However, it is not clear how useful this would be. The semantics for matching dictionaries, objects and sequences already incorporates an implicit ‘and’: all attributes and elements mentioned must be present for the match to succeed. Guard conditions can also support many of the use cases that a hypothetical ‘and’ operator would be used for.

A negation of a match pattern using the operator ! as a prefix would match exactly if the pattern itself does not match. For instance, !(3 | 4) would match anything except 3 or 4. However, there is evidence from other languages that this is rarely useful, and primarily used as double negation !! to control variable scopes and prevent variable bindings (which does not apply to Python). Other use cases are better expressed using guards.

In the end, it was decided that this would make the syntax more complex without adding a significant benefit. It can always be added later.

Example using the OR pattern:

def simplify(expr):
    match expr:
        case ('/', 0, 0):
            return expr
        case ('*'|'/', 0, _):
            return 0
        case ('+'|'-', x, 0) | ('+', 0, x) | ('*', 1, x) | ('*'|'/', x, 1):
            return x
    return expr

Literal Patterns

Literal patterns are a convenient way for imposing constraints on the value of a subject, rather than its type or structure. They also allow you to emulate a switch statement using pattern matching.

Generally, the subject is compared to a literal pattern by means of standard equality (x == y in Python syntax). Consequently, the literal patterns 1.0 and 1 match exactly the same set of objects, i.e. case 1.0: and case 1: are fully interchangeable. In principle, True would also match the same set of objects because True == 1 holds. However, we believe that many users would be surprised finding that case True: matched the subject 1.0, resulting in some subtle bugs and convoluted workarounds. We therefore adopted the rule that the three singleton patterns None, False and True match by identity (x is y in Python syntax) rather than equality. Hence, case True: will match only True and nothing else. Note that case 1: would still match True, though, because the literal pattern 1 works by equality and not identity.

Early ideas to induce a hierarchy on numbers so that case 1.0 would match both the integer 1 and the floating point number 1.0, whereas case 1: would only match the integer 1 were eventually dropped in favor of the simpler and more consistent rule based on equality. Moreover, any additional checks whether the subject is an instance of numbers.Integral would come at a high runtime cost to introduce what would essentially be a novel idea in Python. When needed, the explicit syntax case int(1): can be used.

Recall that literal patterns are not expressions, but directly denote a specific value. From a pragmatic point of view, we want to allow using negative and even complex values as literal patterns, but they are not atomic literals (only unsigned real and imaginary numbers are). E.g., -3+4j is syntactically an expression of the form BinOp(UnaryOp('-', 3), '+', 4j). Since expressions are not part of patterns, we had to add explicit syntactic support for such values without having to resort to full expressions.

Interpolated f-strings, on the other hand, are not literal values, despite their appearance and can therefore not be used as literal patterns (string concatenation, however, is supported).

Literal patterns not only occur as patterns in their own right, but also as keys in mapping patterns.

Range matching patterns. This would allow patterns such as 1...6. However, there are a host of ambiguities:

• Is the range open, half-open, or closed? (I.e. is 6 included in the above example or not?)
• Does the range match a single number, or a range object?
• Range matching is often used for character ranges (‘a’…’z’) but that won’t work in Python since there’s no character data type, just strings.
• Range matching can be a significant performance optimization if you can pre-build a jump table, but that’s not generally possible in Python due to the fact that names can be dynamically rebound.

Rather than creating a special-case syntax for ranges, it was decided that allowing custom pattern objects (InRange(0, 6)) would be more flexible and less ambiguous; however those ideas have been postponed for the time being.

Example using Literal patterns:

def simplify(expr):
    match expr:
        case ('+', 0, x):
            return x
        case ('+' | '-', x, 0):
            return x
        case ('and', True, x):
            return x
        case ('and', False, x):
            return False
        case ('or', False, x):
            return x
        case ('or', True, x):
            return True
        case ('not', ('not', x)):
            return x
    return expr

Capture Patterns

Capture patterns take on the form of a name that accepts any value and binds it to a (local) variable (unless the name is declared as nonlocal or global). In that sense, a capture pattern is similar to a parameter in a function definition (when the function is called, each parameter binds the respective argument to a local variable in the function’s scope).

A name used for a capture pattern must not coincide with another capture pattern in the same pattern. This, again, is similar to parameters, which equally require each parameter name to be unique within the list of parameters. It differs, however, from iterable unpacking assignment, where the repeated use of a variable name as target is permissible (e.g., x, x = 1, 2). The rationale for not supporting (x, x) in patterns is its ambiguous reading: it could be seen as in iterable unpacking where only the second binding to x survives. But it could be equally seen as expressing a tuple with two equal elements (which comes with its own issues). Should the need arise, then it is still possible to introduce support for repeated use of names later on.

There were calls to explicitly mark capture patterns and thus identify them as binding targets. According to that idea, a capture pattern would be written as, e.g. ?x, $x or =x. The aim of such explicit capture markers is to let an unmarked name be a value pattern (see below). However, this is based on the misconception that pattern matching was an extension of switch statements, placing the emphasis on fast switching based on (ordinal) values. Such a switch statement has indeed been proposed for Python before (see PEP 275 and PEP 3103). Pattern matching, on the other hand, builds a generalized concept of iterable unpacking. Binding values extracted from a data structure is at the very core of the concept and hence the most common use case. Explicit markers for capture patterns would thus betray the objective of the proposed pattern matching syntax and simplify a secondary use case at the expense of additional syntactic clutter for core cases.

It has been proposed that capture patterns are not needed at all, since the equivalent effect can be obtained by combining an AS pattern with a wildcard pattern (e.g., case _ as x is equivalent to case x). However, this would be unpleasantly verbose, especially given that we expect capture patterns to be very common.

Example using Capture patterns:

def average(*args):
    match args:
        case [x, y]:           # captures the two elements of a sequence
            return (x + y) / 2
        case [x]:              # captures the only element of a sequence
            return x
        case []:
            return 0
        case a:                # captures the entire sequence
            return sum(a) / len(a)

Wildcard Pattern

The wildcard pattern is a special case of a ‘capture’ pattern: it accepts any value, but does not bind it to a variable. The idea behind this rule is to support repeated use of the wildcard in patterns. While (x, x) is an error, (_, _) is legal.

Particularly in larger (sequence) patterns, it is important to allow the pattern to concentrate on values with actual significance while ignoring anything else. Without a wildcard, it would become necessary to ‘invent’ a number of local variables, which would be bound but never used. Even when sticking to naming conventions and using e.g. _1, _2, _3 to name irrelevant values, say, this still introduces visual clutter and can hurt performance (compare the sequence pattern (x, y, *z) to (_, y, *_), where the *z forces the interpreter to copy a potentially very long sequence, whereas the second version simply compiles to code along the lines of y = seq[1]).

There has been much discussion about the choice of the underscore as _ as a wildcard pattern, i.e. making this one name non-binding. However, the underscore is already heavily used as an ‘ignore value’ marker in iterable unpacking. Since the wildcard pattern _ never binds, this use of the underscore does not interfere with other uses such as inside the REPL or the gettext module.

It has been proposed to use ... (i.e., the ellipsis token) or * (star) as a wildcard. However, both these look as if an arbitrary number of items is omitted:

case [a, ..., z]: ...
case [a, *, z]: ...

Either example looks like it would match a sequence of two or more items, capturing the first and last values. While that may be the ultimate “wildcard”, it does not convey the desired semantics.

An alternative that does not suggest an arbitrary number of items would be ?. This is even being proposed independently from pattern matching in PEP 640. We feel however that using ? as a special “assignment” target is likely more confusing to Python users than using _. It violates Python’s (admittedly vague) principle of using punctuation characters only in ways similar to how they are used in common English usage or in high school math, unless the usage is very well established in other programming languages (like, e.g., using a dot for member access).

The question mark fails on both counts: its use in other programming languages is a grab-bag of usages only vaguely suggested by the idea of a “question”. For example, it means “any character” in shell globbing, “maybe” in regular expressions, “conditional expression” in C and many C-derived languages, “predicate function” in Scheme, “modify error handling” in Rust, “optional argument” and “optional chaining” in TypeScript (the latter meaning has also been proposed for Python by PEP 505). An as yet unnamed PEP proposes it to mark optional types, e.g. int?.

Another common use of ? in programming systems is “help”, for example, in IPython and Jupyter Notebooks and many interactive command-line utilities.

In addition, this would put Python in a rather unique position: The underscore is as a wildcard pattern in every programming language with pattern matching that we could find (including C#, Elixir, Erlang, F#, Grace, Haskell, Mathematica, OCaml, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, and Thorn). Keeping in mind that many users of Python also work with other programming languages, have prior experience when learning Python, and may move on to other languages after having learned Python, we find that such well-established standards are important and relevant with respect to readability and learnability. In our view, concerns that this wildcard means that a regular name received special treatment are not strong enough to introduce syntax that would make Python special.

Else blocks. A case block without a guard whose pattern is a single wildcard (i.e., case _:) accepts any subject without binding it to a variable or performing any other operation. It is thus semantically equivalent to else:, if it were supported. However, adding such an else block to the match statement syntax would not remove the need for the wildcard pattern in other contexts. Another argument against this is that there would be two plausible indentation levels for an else block: aligned with case or aligned with match. The authors have found it quite contentious which indentation level to prefer.

Example using the Wildcard pattern:

def is_closed(sequence):
    match sequence:
        case [_]:               # any sequence with a single element
            return True
        case [start, *_, end]:  # a sequence with at least two elements
            return start == end
        case _:                 # anything
            return False

Value Patterns

It is good programming style to use named constants for parametric values or to clarify the meaning of particular values. Clearly, it would be preferable to write case (HttpStatus.OK, body): over case (200, body):, for example. The main issue that arises here is how to distinguish capture patterns (variable bindings) from value patterns. The general discussion surrounding this issue has brought forward a plethora of options, which we cannot all fully list here.

Strictly speaking, value patterns are not really necessary, but could be implemented using guards, i.e. case (status, body) if status == HttpStatus.OK:. Nonetheless, the convenience of value patterns is unquestioned and obvious.

The observation that constants tend to be written in uppercase letters or collected in enumeration-like namespaces suggests possible rules to discern constants syntactically. However, the idea of using upper- vs. lowercase as a marker has been met with scepticism since there is no similar precedence in core Python (although it is common in other languages). We therefore only adopted the rule that any dotted name (i.e., attribute access) is to be interpreted as a value pattern, for example HttpStatus.OK above. This precludes, in particular, local variables and global variables defined in the current module from acting as constants.

A proposed rule to use a leading dot (e.g. .CONSTANT) for that purpose was criticised because it was felt that the dot would not be a visible-enough marker for that purpose. Partly inspired by forms found in other programming languages, a number of different markers/sigils were proposed (such as ^CONSTANT, $CONSTANT, ==CONSTANT, CONSTANT?, or the word enclosed in backticks), although there was no obvious or natural choice. The current proposal therefore leaves the discussion and possible introduction of such a ‘constant’ marker for a future PEP.

Distinguishing the semantics of names based on whether it is a global variable (i.e. the compiler would treat global variables as constants rather than capture patterns) leads to various issues. The addition or alteration of a global variable in the module could have unintended side effects on patterns. Moreover, pattern matching could not be used directly inside a module’s scope because all variables would be global, making capture patterns impossible.

Example using the Value pattern:

def handle_reply(reply):
    match reply:
        case (HttpStatus.OK, MimeType.TEXT, body):
            process_text(body)
        case (HttpStatus.OK, MimeType.APPL_ZIP, body):
            text = deflate(body)
            process_text(text)
        case (HttpStatus.MOVED_PERMANENTLY, new_URI):
            resend_request(new_URI)
        case (HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND):
            raise ResourceNotFound()

Group Patterns

Allowing users to explicitly specify the grouping is particularly helpful in case of OR patterns.

Sequence Patterns

Sequence patterns follow as closely as possible the already established syntax and semantics of iterable unpacking. Of course, subpatterns take the place of assignment targets (variables, attributes and subscript). Moreover, the sequence pattern only matches a carefully selected set of possible subjects, whereas iterable unpacking can be applied to any iterable.

• As in iterable unpacking, we do not distinguish between ‘tuple’ and ‘list’ notation. [a, b, c], (a, b, c) and a, b, c are all equivalent. While this means we have a redundant notation and checking specifically for lists or tuples requires more effort (e.g. case list([a, b, c])), we mimic iterable unpacking as much as possible.
• A starred pattern will capture a sub-sequence of arbitrary length, again mirroring iterable unpacking. Only one starred item may be present in any sequence pattern. In theory, patterns such as (*_, 3, *_) could be understood as expressing any sequence containing the value 3. In practice, however, this would only work for a very narrow set of use cases and lead to inefficient backtracking or even ambiguities otherwise.
• The sequence pattern does not iterate through an iterable subject. All elements are accessed through subscripting and slicing, and the subject must be an instance of collections.abc.Sequence. This includes, of course, lists and tuples, but excludes e.g. sets and dictionaries. While it would include strings and bytes, we make an exception for these (see below).

A sequence pattern cannot just iterate through any iterable object. The consumption of elements from the iteration would have to be undone if the overall pattern fails, which is not feasible.

To identify sequences we cannot rely on len() and subscripting and slicing alone, because sequences share these protocols with mappings (e.g. dict) in this regard. It would be surprising if a sequence pattern also matched a dictionaries or other objects implementing the mapping protocol (i.e. __getitem__). The interpreter therefore performs an instance check to ensure that the subject in question really is a sequence (of known type). (As an optimization of the most common case, if the subject is exactly a list or a tuple, the instance check can be skipped.)

String and bytes objects have a dual nature: they are both ‘atomic’ objects in their own right, as well as sequences (with a strongly recursive nature in that a string is a sequence of strings). The typical behavior and use cases for strings and bytes are different enough from those of tuples and lists to warrant a clear distinction. It is in fact often unintuitive and unintended that strings pass for sequences, as evidenced by regular questions and complaints. Strings and bytes are therefore not matched by a sequence pattern, limiting the sequence pattern to a very specific understanding of ‘sequence’. The built-in bytearray type, being a mutable version of bytes, also deserves an exception; but we don’t intend to enumerate all other types that may be used to represent bytes (e.g. some, but not all, instances of memoryview and array.array).

Mapping Patterns

Dictionaries or mappings in general are one of the most important and most widely used data structures in Python. In contrast to sequences, mappings are built for fast direct access to arbitrary elements identified by a key. In most cases an element is retrieved from a dictionary by a known key without regard for any ordering or other key-value pairs stored in the same dictionary. Particularly common are string keys.

The mapping pattern reflects the common usage of dictionary lookup: it allows the user to extract some values from a mapping by means of constant/known keys and have the values match given subpatterns. Extra keys in the subject are ignored even if **rest is not present. This is different from sequence patterns, where extra items will cause a match to fail. But mappings are actually different from sequences: they have natural structural sub-typing behavior, i.e., passing a dictionary with extra keys somewhere will likely just work. Should it be necessary to impose an upper bound on the mapping and ensure that no additional keys are present, then the usual double-star-pattern **rest can be used. The special case **_ with a wildcard, however, is not supported as it would not have any effect, but might lead to an incorrect understanding of the mapping pattern’s semantics.

To avoid overly expensive matching algorithms, keys must be literals or value patterns.

There is a subtle reason for using get(key, default) instead of __getitem__(key) followed by a check for AttributeError: if the subject happens to be a defaultdict, calling __getitem__ for a non-existent key would add the key. Using get() avoids this unexpected side effect.

Example using the Mapping pattern:

def change_red_to_blue(json_obj):
    match json_obj:
        case { 'color': ('red' | '#FF0000') }:
            json_obj['color'] = 'blue'
        case { 'children': children }:
            for child in children:
                change_red_to_blue(child)

Class Patterns

Class patterns fulfill two purposes: checking whether a given subject is indeed an instance of a specific class, and extracting data from specific attributes of the subject. Anecdotal evidence revealed that isinstance() is one of the most often used functions in Python in terms of static occurrences in programs. Such instance checks typically precede a subsequent access to information stored in the object, or a possible manipulation thereof. A typical pattern might be along the lines of:

def traverse_tree(node):
    if isinstance(node, Node):
        traverse_tree(node.left)
        traverse_tree(node.right)
    elif isinstance(node, Leaf):
        print(node.value)

In many cases class patterns occur nested, as in the example given in the motivation:

if (isinstance(node, BinOp) and node.op == "+"
        and isinstance(node.right, BinOp) and node.right.op == "*"):
    a, b, c = node.left, node.right.left, node.right.right
    # Handle a + b*c

The class pattern lets you concisely specify both an instance check and relevant attributes (with possible further constraints). It is thereby very tempting to write, e.g., case Node(left, right): in the first case above and case Leaf(value): in the second. While this indeed works well for languages with strict algebraic data types, it is problematic with the structure of Python objects.

When dealing with general Python objects, we face a potentially very large number of unordered attributes: an instance of Node contains a large number of attributes (most of which are ‘special methods’ such as __repr__). Moreover, the interpreter cannot reliably deduce the ordering of attributes. For an object that represents a circle, say, there is no inherently obvious ordering of the attributes x, y and radius.

We envision two possibilities for dealing with this issue: either explicitly name the attributes of interest, or provide an additional mapping that tells the interpreter which attributes to extract and in which order. Both approaches are supported. Moreover, explicitly naming the attributes of interest lets you further specify the required structure of an object; if an object lacks an attribute specified by the pattern, the match fails.

• Attributes that are explicitly named pick up the syntax of named arguments. If an object of class Node has two attributes left and right as above, the pattern Node(left=x, right=y) will extract the values of both attributes and assign them to x and y, respectively. The data flow from left to right seems unusual, but is in line with mapping patterns and has precedents such as assignments via as in with- or import-statements (and indeed AS patterns).

  Naming the attributes in question explicitly will be mostly used for more complex cases where the positional form (below) is insufficient.

• The class field __match_args__ specifies a number of attributes together with their ordering, allowing class patterns to rely on positional sub-patterns without having to explicitly name the attributes in question. This is particularly handy for smaller objects or instances of data classes, where the attributes of interest are rather obvious and often have a well-defined ordering. In a way, __match_args__ is similar to the declaration of formal parameters, which allows calling functions with positional arguments rather than naming all the parameters.

  This is a class attribute, because it needs to be looked up on the class named in the class pattern, not on the subject instance.

The syntax of class patterns is based on the idea that de-construction mirrors the syntax of construction. This is already the case in virtually any Python construct, be assignment targets, function definitions or iterable unpacking. In all these cases, we find that the syntax for sending and that for receiving ‘data’ are virtually identical.

• Assignment targets such as variables, attributes and subscripts: foo.bar[2] = foo.bar[3];
• Function definitions: a function defined with def foo(x, y, z=6) is called as, e.g., foo(123, y=45), where the actual arguments provided at the call site are matched against the formal parameters at the definition site;
• Iterable unpacking: a, b = b, a or [a, b] = [b, a] or (a, b) = (b, a), just to name a few equivalent possibilities.

Using the same syntax for reading and writing, l- and r-values, or construction and de-construction is widely accepted for its benefits in thinking about data, its flow and manipulation. This equally extends to the explicit construction of instances, where class patterns C(p, q) deliberately mirror the syntax of creating instances.

The special case for the built-in classes bool, bytearray etc. (where e.g. str(x) captures the subject value in x) can be emulated by a user-defined class as follows:

class MyClass:
    __match_args__ = ["__myself__"]
    __myself__ = property(lambda self: self)

Type annotations for pattern variables. The proposal was to combine patterns with type annotations:

match x:
    case [a: int, b: str]: print(f"An int {a} and a string {b}:)
    case [a: int, b: int, c: int]: print("Three ints", a, b, c)
    ...

This idea has a lot of problems. For one, the colon can only be used inside of brackets or parentheses, otherwise the syntax becomes ambiguous. And because Python disallows isinstance() checks on generic types, type annotations containing generics will not work as expected.