Pattern matching is a simple tool that will make your code safer and easier to read. Consider the following code that converts an Int to a string. public enum Language { Spanish, English } public static string convert(int number, Language lang) { string ret = ""; if (lang == Language.English) { switch(number) { case 0: ret = "zero"; break; case 1: ret = "one"; break; default: ret = "..."; break; }