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Learning Elixir

You're reading from   Learning Elixir Unveil many hidden gems of programming functionally by taking the foundational steps with Elixir

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2016
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781785881749
Length 286 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Kenneth Ballou Kenneth Ballou
Author Profile Icon Kenneth Ballou
Kenneth Ballou
Kenny Ballou Kenny Ballou
Author Profile Icon Kenny Ballou
Kenny Ballou
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introducing Elixir – Thinking Functionally FREE CHAPTER 2. Elixir Basics – Foundational Steps toward Functional Programming 3. Modules and Functions – Creating Functional Building Blocks 4. Collections and Stream Processing 5. Control Flow – Occasionally You Need to Branch 6. Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency 7. OTP – A Poor Name for a Rich Framework 8. Distributed Elixir – Taking Concurrency to the Next Node 9. Metaprogramming – Doing More with Less Index

Grabbing functions


Elixir supports passing defined functions as parameters. That is, Elixir's functions are first-class citizens of the type system. But then, how do we pass the existing functions around? We use the & operator or function capture operator . Going back to our MyMath.square/1 function, we could pass it to Enum.map/2 with the following:

iex(1)> import_file("mymath.exs")
...
iex(2)> Enum.map([1, 2, 3], &MyMath.square/1)
[1, 4, 9]

Here, we load the module again, for completeness, and then we invoke Enum.map/2 with the list [1, 2, 3] and pass our square/1 function from MyMath. You may wonder why we need to grab the function with the arity. This, if you recall, is because Elixir functions are defined by their name and arity or number of parameters. For example, say we define our square/1 function as pow/1 instead where, if pow is given one function, it assumes we want to raise the argument to the second power, otherwise, there is a pow/2 that takes the base and the...

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