You can do something similar in any language that support booleans as keys for dictionaries/hashtables/maps/associative arrays/...
For instance in Lua:
function abs(x)
test = {
[true]=-x,
[x>0]=x,
[x==0]=0}
return test[true]
end
> print (abs(-3))
3
To understand this code, think that `test[true]` is overwritten at initialization time by the last predicate to evaluate to True.It's not the best way to do this, but maybe it'will help understand the above construct.