Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Using Bindings to Inject Values

Remember that there are two ways of injecting values into quoted blocks. One is unquote. The other is to use a binding. However, the two have different uses and different semantics.

A binding is simply a keyword list of variable names and their values. When we pass a binding to quote, the variables are set inside the body of that quote.

This is useful because macros are executed at compile time. This means they don’t have access to values that are calculated at runtime.

Here’s an example. The intent is to have a macro that defines a function that returns its own name:

defmacro mydef(name) do
  quote do
    def unquote(name)(), do: unquote(name)
  end
end

We try this out using something like ...