Hello, I’m new to Elixir, I’m reading a book called Learning Functional Programming with Elixir I’m reading a subject of how Elixir data are immutable but when I just create a value in iex shell (Elixir (1.11.0) ) like this: message = "Hello, World!!!" display the above variable I get what I’m exp…

What you doing is rebinding and it doesn’t break immutability. You are creating a new variable with same name that shadows the old one. This should explain it to you https://medium.com/everydayhero-engineering/elixir-variable-rebinding-342c5d0fd961

The answer from wanton7 is perfect, even though even for me it looked strange at first. If you want to understand why immutability, the best explanation I found about immutability was Rich Hickey’s (he created Clojure and Datomic). [The Value of Values with Rich Hickey]

It can be slightly confusing because elixir allows rebinding identifiers. Immutability is as a result a bit closer to how strings behave in many popular languages (e.g. C#) where the value a variable name points to can change but the value itself cannot. Every change to a value results in a new val…

Not sure if this is helpful to you but this something which is easy to miss as a beginner. a = 1 for i <- 1..5 do a = a + 1 IO.puts(" #{i}) #{a}") end IO.puts("After `for` #{a}") You can compare the output for similar code in other language and see the difference.

Elixir Programming Language Forum

Understand immutability

Questions & Help Questions

Muco December 11, 2020, 9:39pm 8

Thanks @akash-akya