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:else is a convention in Clojure that has truthy keywords. You could replace that with anything that evaluates to true, like :foo, or true, or 1, etc.

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But don't you see what I'm saying? I assume the order is important, and if the else: (or whatever else you decide to use) were first it would match everything and prevent the other cases from being used. So it's exactly equivalent to an if/elif/else chain. The structure is the same.

Things can be semantically equivalent but more elegant, easier to read, and harder to make mistakes.

I think most function programmers are actually very familiar with the patters found in Java. It's often one of the reasons they fell in love with more functional styles of programming.

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