[RFC] Match expression

Hi everybody! Has this idea been discussed before? I find myself writing switch statements in PHP quite rarely. This has a few reasons: 1. It doesn’t have a "strict_types” version 2. It is quite verbose (lots of breaks) 3. It is a statement rather than an expression Often, if / elseif statements turn out to be shorter, safer and easier to read than the switch statement. What I’d really love is something like a match expression: ``` $r = match ($x) {     1: ‘Tiny’;     <= 10: ‘Small’;     <= 20: ‘Medium’;     <= 30: ‘Large’;     range(31, 100): ‘Enormous’; // Equivalent to in_array($x, range(31, 100), true)     instanceof Foo, instanceof Bar: ‘What?’;     default: ‘Unknown’; }; ``` These are the main differences compared to a traditional switch statement: - The whole match is an expression, the result of the executed case is implicitly returned - It allows pattern matching, not just == comparison, === is the default - It does no implicit type conversion, thus no unexpected results when mixing strings and numbers - Each case has an implicit break     - Where you’d previously use two cases without a break, you now combine conditions using a comma One downside, since PHP doesn’t implicitly return the last statement as some languages do there’s no obvious way to do multi-statement cases. I assume that some people will not be so happy about having to switch-like constructs. IMO the implicit type conversion is the biggest issue here. Maybe we could offer a solution for this one at least. Just some random thoughts. Regards