Editing
Function Clauses in Elixir
(section)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
=== Pattern Matching and Overloading === Function clauses in Elixir take advantage of pattern matching to determine which implementation to invoke based on the provided arguments. When a function is called, Elixir will match the arguments against the defined clauses and execute the first matching clause. This allows developers to provide different behavior for different input patterns. ```elixir defmodule Math do def sum([]), do: 0 def sum([head | tail]), do: head + sum(tail) end ``` In the above code, we define the `sum` function with two clauses. The first clause handles an empty list, returning `0`. The second clause handles a list with at least one element by recursively summing the elements. Function clauses also enable function overloading, allowing developers to define multiple clauses with the same function name but different arity (number of arguments). Elixir will select the appropriate clause based on the arity of the provided arguments.
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Elixir Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Elixir Wiki:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Navigation menu
Personal tools
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Namespaces
Page
Discussion
English
Views
Read
Edit
View history
More
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Page information