Programmer Passport: Elixir

Elixir Deemphasizes Control Structures

For the most part, Elixir doesn’t have as many data structures as typical procedural or object-oriented languages. Instead, programmers will use other features such as functions or pattern matching. We’ll look at three now: if/unless, case, and cond. We’ll save with for later.

Compare with if and unless

You’ve already seen one way to do comparisons in Elixir, and it’s often a good way. In the Color module, we used pattern matching within our function head to compare values. The performance of this kind of comparison is very good.

Another way to do such comparisons is with the if statement. Go to your IEx session. Let’s assign a variable to compare against, like this:

iex(16)> x = 10
10

Now, let’s use