Yeah, Perl’s been there a long time ago. Initially, Perl did not have a native switch/case statement. However, early on Perlers started to obsess about emulated switch constructs and so Perl 5.10 shipped given/when which was supposed to become the language‘s official switch implementation. But it never really quite took of. While part of it was due to a subtle bug I‘d argue nobody actually needed it. 99% of the time if/elsif/else is good enough and otherwise you might want to consider a dispatch table if the number of cases is large. Beyond Perl this is true in most languages: If you find yourself in a situation to need an extensive if/else chain and to wish for C-like switch/case you’re either writing a parser or you should really rethink about your software‘s architecture (maybe in terms of OOP).