Getting the position of a list item

[Tim Fletcher]

> I usually see code like this implemented like this:
>
> base32_decode2(Char) when Char>=$0, Char=<$9 ->
>     Char-47;
>
> base32_decode2(Char) when Char>=$b, Char=<$h ->
>     Char-87;
>
> base32_decode2(Char) when Char>=$j, Char=<$k ->
>     Char-88;
>
> base32_decode2(Char) when Char>=$m, Char=<$n ->
>     Char-89;
>
> base32_decode2(Char) when Char>=$p, Char=<$z ->
>     Char-90.

Sure, that's the style i'd usually use for similar problems, but
because there were gaps in the sequence of letters i thought that the
2 shorter functions would be better than the one longer one.

Something like "0123456789bcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz".index(char) is
pretty succinct in comparison, but then languages like Python, Ruby
etc. don't have the pattern matching as an alternative, so the index
function is more idiomatic there.


Tim