Chapter 2. Basic Erlang

This chapter is where we start covering the basics of Erlang. You may expect we’ll just be covering things you have seen before in programming languages, but there will be some surprises, whether your background is in C/CC++, Java, Python, or functional programming. Erlang has assignment, but not as you know it from other imperative languages, because you can assign to each variable only once. Erlang has pattern matching, which not only determines control flow, but also binds variables and pulls apart complex data structures. Erlang pattern matching is different in subtle ways from other functional languages. So, you’ll need to read carefully! We conclude the chapter by showing how to define Erlang functions and place them into modules to create programs, but we start by surveying the basic data types in Erlang.