Programming Elixir 1.2

Implementing an if Statement

Let’s imagine Elixir didn’t have an if statement—all it has is case. Although we’re prepared to abandon our old friend the while loop, not having an if statement is just too much to bear, so we set about implementing one.

We’ll want to call it using something like

myif condition do
  evaluate if true
else
  evaluate if false
end

We know that blocks in Elixir are converted into keyword parameters, so this is equivalent to

myif condition,
  do:   evaluate if true,
  else: evaluate if false

Here’s a sample call:

My.myif 1==2, do: (IO.puts "1 == 2"), else: (IO.puts "1 != 2")

Let’s try to implement myif as a function:

defmodule My do
  def myif(condition, clauses) do
 do_clause = Keyword.get(clauses, ...