Abuse of match?

Question

Would you consider the following block of code match abuse and if so what\'s a more elegant way to do it without a big if-else-if block?

def sum(base: Int, x         


        

Answer 1

No. Why abuse? It's fairly readable IMO...

The problem I see is that money match ... is fairly arbitrary (you only use the direct pattern in the first case); a complete "abuse" would start like

() match {
  case _ if (money == 0) => 1
  ...

So perhaps stick to if-else; you can combine the second and third condition (if( money < 0 || coins.isEmpty ) ...)

---

Also note that although you "know" in the end that coins is not empty and thus may "safely" call head and tail on it, this is a typical source of unexpected runtime errors. The advantage of coins match { case Nil => ...; case head :: tail => ...} is that you cannot make such a mistake.