Learn Functional Programming with Elixir

Representing Values

Values are anything that can represent data in Elixir. They are the number of cars purchased, the text in a blog post, the price of a game, the password text of a login. They are everything a program receives as input, computes, and generates as a result.

Open your IEx shell and type this:

iex> 10
10

You have typed a value. I know—this short snippet doesn’t look very exciting, but when we think of everything that happens in the background to let us type a value like this, it’s fascinating. When you see it, it’s easy to guess that it represents a number. Literals represent values that humans can easily understand. Elixir does all the work to transform the literals into a format for machines. We only need to worry about ...