Making Two Things Match
Explore the fundamentals of pattern matching in Elixir and understand how it controls program flow by deciding which functions execute. Learn about the match operator, variable binding, rebinding with the pin operator, and how pattern matching raises errors when values don't match. This lesson guides you through key concepts to effectively use pattern matching in functional programming.
We'll cover the following...
Introduction to pattern matching
Controlling the program flow means controlling which functions and expressions will be executed. Imperative languages rely mainly on conditional constructors like if, but here in the functional world, pattern matching plays the central role. However, pattern matching is often misunderstood and challenging for beginners to comprehend, which is why half of this chapter is dedicated to understanding ...
We’ll then use pattern matching to decide which function to dispatch to have a ...