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Mastering Elixir
book

Mastering Elixir

by André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
July 2018
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
574 pages
14h 7m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Mastering Elixir

The abstract syntax tree

You may have already heard about Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) in other languages. As the name indicates, these are tree-like data structures that represent the code syntax. In Elixir, we call these representations quoted expressions.

If we try to obtain the quoted expression of simple expressions, such as single atoms, strings, integers or floats, lists or two element tuples, we'll see their quoted representation doesn't change when compared to their normal representation. These elements are called literals because we get the same value after quoting them. Take a look at the following code:

iex> quote do: :"Funky.Atom":"Funky.Atom"iex> quote do: ["a", "b", "c", "z"]["a", "b", "c", "z"]iex> quote do: 1.881.88iex> ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781788472678Supplemental Content