Chapter 22Protocols—Polymorphic Functions
We have used the inspect function many times in this book. It returns a printable representation of any value as a binary (which is what we hard-core folks call strings).
But stop and think for a minute. Just how can Elixir, which doesn’t have objects, know what to call to do the conversion to a binary? You can pass inspect anything, and Elixir somehow makes sense of it.
It could be done using guard clauses:
| | def inspect(value) when is_atom(value), do: ... |
| | def inspect(value) when is_binary(value), do: ... |
| | : : |
But there’s a better way.
Elixir has the concept of protocols. A protocol is a little like the behaviours we saw in the previous chapter in that it defines the functions that must be provided ...
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