Programming Elixir 1.3

Digging Ridiculously Deep

Here’s the internal representation of a simple expression:

iex(1)> quote do: 1 + 2
{:+, [context: Elixir, import: Kernel], [1, 2]}

It’s just a three-element tuple. In this particular case, the first element is the function (or macro), the second is housekeeping metadata, and the third is the arguments.

We know we can evaluate this code fragment using eval_quoted, and we can save typing by leaving off the metadata:

iex> Code.eval_quoted {:+, [], [1,2]}
{3,[]}

And now we can start to see the promise (and danger) of a homoiconic language. Because code is just tuples and because we can manipulate those tuples, we rewrite the definitions of existing functions. We can create new code on the fly. And we can do ...