September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
548 pages
12h 25m
English
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Chapter 5Records and Maps
So far we have talked about two containers for data, namely, tuples and lists. Tuples are used to store a fixed number of elements, and lists are used for a variable number of elements.
This chapter introduces records and maps. Records are really just tuples in disguise. Using records we can associate a name with each element in a tuple.
Maps are associative collections of key-value pairs. The key can be any Erlang term. In Perl and Ruby they are called hashes; in C++ and Java they are called maps, in Lua they are called tables, and in Python they are called dictionaries.
Using records and maps makes programming easier; instead of remembering where a data item is stored in a complex data structure, we just use ...
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