I’ve been in the Elixir world for five years—not super long but also not super short. In this time I have seen lots of code that uses elem/2 but not once have I ever seen a situation where it made code clearer and in fact has always made code less clear. It seems its main use it to “not break pipe…

[image] sodapopcan: The question here is why do you have large tuples? I don’t think I’ve come across one with more than 4 before, though I could be wrong. The type of work I do is very limited to business web apps, but large tuples seem like a massive anti-pattern to me. An example from a pr…

Sometimes I just want to write a one-liner or pipeline and I’m too lazy to get fancy with the error handling. :man_shrugging:

You have tuples, a fixed size array of elements. You can access them by a random index. There is no syntax to access a random index of a tuple Pattern matching requires you to know the length of the tuple up-front I think it makes sense to have such a function be part of the standard library. The …

Agree 100% with doorgan. With regards to elem/2 in pipelines, maybe a credo check for this would be useful.

elem/2 can be used in guards, pattern matching cannot elem/2 is O(1) access to a vector (the only other O(1) example is binaries). Pattern matching with large tuples is verbose and it’s easy to get the wrong element (why count wildcard matches when you can write the correct index into a function a…

Pattern matching with large tuples is verbose and it’s easy to get the wrong element If you are on control of the data: Use Records to overcome this issue

Thanks for all the responses? [image] dorgan: Wether or not it’s idiomatic to access a random element of a tuple is a whole different topic. Ya, what I’m really asking is: “Does anyone have an example of an exemplary use of elem/2?” I’ve never been in a situation where I don’t know the size…

[image] BartOtten: If you are on control of the data: Use Records to overcome this issue I particularly wouldn’t use records in elixir, I think the semantics are not particularly well ported. the only use I see for records in elixir is to interact with erlang existing records. I was even thin…

[image] v0idpwn: With regards to elem/2 in pipelines, maybe a credo check for this would be useful. I don’t actually have a problem with it in any apps I work on, even at work, was just generally looking for a case where pattern matching isn’t better. Though it could actually be a fun but ja…

[image] cevado: but I guess i’m going too off-topic here :smile: Everyone is always free to go off topic in any thread I create :sweat_smile:

Why does `elem/2` exist?

Questions & Help Questions

dimitarvp July 11, 2024, 9:33am 7

Agreed, but it has to be noted that then – which solves the problem of not breaking pipelines – was only added in Elixir 1.12.

Use then.