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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

Calling functions

There's another issue I've so far been skirting over—the syntax of calling functions. Specifically, you may have seen some examples around in which calling a function does not use parentheses to denote the function call. For example, from our previous example, these are equivalent:

iex(3)> MyMath.square(4)
16
iex(4)> MyMath.square 4
16

Why, you ask, is this the case? Why do we have two different acceptable forms? Elixir has a lot of its roots in Erlang. But this is only, so far, as some basic syntax and the runtime. The syntax borrows fairly heavily from Ruby. Thus, there's some Ruby syntactical elements present throughout Elixir, and this happens to be one of the Ruby carry-overs.

As far as when to use one version of the syntax over another is concerned, it depends. I would argue it's mostly a preference of style. If you like to read functions with less braces running around, don't use parentheses to invoke functions. Or, you may like...

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