When and Then: The Case Statement

The if/else statement is powerful, but we can get bogged down in ifs and elsifs if we have a lot of conditions to check. Thankfully, Ruby provides us with a concise alternative: the case statement. The syntax looks like this:

case language
  when "JS"
    puts "Websites!"
  when "Python"
    puts "Science!"
  when "Ruby"
    puts "Web apps!"
  else
    puts "I don't know!"
end

But you can fold it up like so:

case language
  when "JS" then puts "Websites!"
  when "Python" then puts "Science!"
  when "Ruby" then puts "Web apps!"
  else puts "I don't know!"
end