Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition

Numbers

Numbers in Erlang are either integers or floats.

Integers

Integer arithmetic is exact, and the number of digits that can be represented in an integer is limited only by available memory.

Integers are written with one of three different syntaxes.

Conventional syntax

Here integers are written as you expect. For example, 12, 12375, and -23427 are all integers.

Base K integers

Integers in a number base other than ten are written with the syntax K#Digits; thus, we can write a number in binary as 2#00101010 or a number in hexadecimal as 16#af6bfa23. For bases greater than ten, the characters abc... (or ABC...) represent the numbers 10, 11, 12, and so on. The highest number base is 36.

$ syntax

The syntax $C represents the integer code ...