Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Tuples

Suppose we want to group a fixed number of items into a single entity. For this we’d use a tuple. We can create a tuple by enclosing the values we want to represent in curly brackets and separating them with commas. So, for example, if we want to represent someone’s name and height, we might use {joe, 1.82}. This is a tuple containing an atom and a floating-point number.

Tuples are similar to structs in C, with the difference that they are anonymous. In C, a variable P of type point might be declared as follows:

We’d access the fields in a C struct using the dot operator. So, to set the x and y values in the point, we might say this:

Erlang has no type declarations, so to ...