The World Is Your Playground
Metaprogramming in Elixir is all about extensibility. Have you ever wished your favorite language would adopt that one neat feature? If you’re lucky, it might take years to happen. Often it never happens at all. In Elixir, you can introduce new first-class features at will. Take the familiar while loop that you find in most languages. It’s missing from Elixir, but you can imagine writing one like this:
| | while Process.alive?(pid) do |
| | send pid, {self, :ping} |
| | receive do |
| | {^pid, :pong} -> IO.puts "Got pong" |
| | after 2000 -> break |
| | end |
| | end |
In the next chapter, we make this while loop a reality. It doesn’t stop there, though. With Elixir, we can define languages with the language, to express all kinds ...
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