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>But if you call it "pattern matching," and it has less power than a regular expression, it feels misleading or like false advertising. But, as just a feature, I think it's great.

I always it was haskell that introduced the term...

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The concept certainly predates Haskell by a few decades, but I haven’t found the origin of the phrase.

I tried to find a copy of this SNOBOL paper from 1973[0] to see whether it occurs there, but no luck so far. It doesn’t appear in the original COMIT paper[1].

[0]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/361952.361960

[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/comit/comit-paper.html

Haskell copied a huge amount of its core concepts from ML, and even then, ML was very much a collection of prior experimental concepts with a new type system on top.

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