An Overview of Elixir's Syntax

153
clicks
An Overview of Elixir's Syntax
Elixir, a functional programming language, offers a syntax that is heavily influenced by Ruby while carrying the Erlang legacy. The author, Lars, with a Python background, finds Elixir syntax to be approachable despite the 'Ruby-isms'. Elixir code blocks are defined with 'do...end', unlike the curly braces in C-style languages, which he believes could be more human-friendly. Elixir's module and function naming follow Pascal case and snake_case, respectively. They also support docstrings and private functions, and facilitate one-liner blocks with ', do:'. Aside from the basics, Elixir provides various types, such as atoms, lists, maps, and tuples, along with syntax sugar and convenient operations for each. Pattern matching is heavily used, and functions can be overloaded based on their arguments. Elixir favors explicit code but also allows for domain-specific languages through macros for cases where less verbosity is desired or for technical necessity. The article also mentions important Elixir conventions, such as using '!' and '?' at the end of function names to indicate raising an error on failure and returning a boolean, respectively. The author guides through interop with Erlang, clarifies the usage of 'alias', 'import', 'require', and 'use', and wraps up with some insights on anonymous functions and the powerful 'Enum' module.

© HashMerge 2024