maybe of interest:

Understanding the benefit of Given/When ...

HTH! =)

Going from that discussion it looks like a good part of 'given's usefulness is centred on smartmatch... Which I don't use in any other way, therefore perhaps 'given' is not all that important after all.

At the end of the day I suppose I would just like a perl 'switch/case/default' because I am very used to that way of thinking and controlling execution.

It's essentially the same with For-If just the fall trough is inverse.

See provided code examples.

update

i.e. you need to terminate with explicit next statements to avoid fall through.

  for ($var){
    if (/abc/) { print "abc"}        # falls through
    if (/def/) { print "def" ;next}
    if (/xyz/) { print "xyz" ;next}
    print "default";
  }
[download]

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

If you want to use some kind of switch statement, you could always try searching CPAN for a switch module.

One module that I've recently used was Switch::Plain. If I understand the documentation correctly, it does not use smartmatch. However, it is limited to "simple string or numeric equality tests". The module's author also includes in the documentation a comparison between this module's implementation of switch and C's switch. Depending on your needs, this module might provide what you're looking for since it does provide a "switch/case/default" construct.