Scala: Pattern matching when one of two items meets some condition

Question

I\'m often writing code that compares two objects and produces a value based on whether they are the same, or different, based on how they are different.

So I might writ

Answer 1

On Scala 2.8:

val result = List(v1,v2).flatten match {
  case List(value1, value2) => "a"
  case List(value) => "b"
  case _ = > "c"
}

On Scala 2.7, however, you need a type hint to make it work. So, assuming value is Int, for instance, then:

val result = (List(v1,v2).flatten : List[Int]) match {
  case List(value1, value2) => "a"
  case List(value) => "b"
  case _ = > "c"
}

The funny thing about it is that I misread "first" as "list" on Mitch Blevins answer, and that gave me this idea. :-)