Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Chapter 24Protocols—Polymorphic Functions

We have used the inspect function many times in this book. It returns a printable representation of any value as a binary (which is what we hard-core folks call strings).

But stop and think for a minute. Just how can Elixir, which doesn’t have objects, know what to call to do the conversion to a binary? You can pass inspect anything, and Elixir somehow makes sense of it.

It could be done using guard clauses:

def inspect(value) when is_atom(value), do: ...
def inspect(value) when is_binary(value), do: ...
  :    :

But there’s a better way.

Elixir has the concept of protocols. A protocol is a little like the behaviours we saw in the previous chapter in that it defines the functions that must be provided ...