Elixir in Action, Second Edition

3 Control flow

This chapter covers:

• Understanding pattern matching
• Working with multiclause functions
• Using conditional expressions
• Working with loops

Now that you’re familiar with Elixir’s basic building blocks, it’s time to look at some typical low-level idioms of the language. In this chapter, we’ll deal with conditionals and loops. As you’ll see, these work differently than in most modern, imperative languages.

Classical conditional constructs such as if and case are often replaced with multiclause functions, and there are no classical loop statements such as while. But you can still solve problems of arbitrary complexity in Elixir, and the resulting code is no more complicated than a typical OO solution.

All this may sound a bit radical, ...