Comment by chongli

While this is a step up from C, it is still a long way from the full power and generality of algebraic data types. The key word here is algebraic. In a language with ADTs, such as Haskell, you can pattern match on an arbitrarily complex types, not just the outermost tag. A contrived example (from [1]):

    contrived :: ([a], Char, (Int, Float), String, Bool) -> Bool
    contrived    ([],  'b',  (1,   2.0),   "hi",   True) = False

To achieve a result like this using Zig's switch syntax would seem to involve a huge amount of boilerplate code and nested switch statements.

[1] https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/patterns.html