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 many imperative languages.

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

All this may sound a bit radical, ...

Get Elixir in Action, Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.