Programmer Passport: Elixir

Tuples, Deconstruction, and Pattern Matching

In Elixir, you use tuples to create lists of things with a fixed size. You represent a tuple with curly braces surrounding elements with commas between:

iex(1)> place = {:stockholm, :sweden}
{:stockholm, :sweden}
iex(2)> origin = {0, 0}
{0, 0}
iex(3)> white = {0xff, 0xff, 0xff}
{255, 255, 255}
iex(4)> success = {:ok, "result"}
{:ok, "result"}
iex(5)> failure = {:error, 401}
{:error, 401}

Each of these examples is a tuple. A point is an iconic example of a tuple. Erlang developers frequently use tuples to pair return codes with results. Notice that the elements of a tuple aren’t necessarily the same type. For example, in a result tuple from a function, the first element ...