Expose Internal Representation

February 14, 2016 ยท View on GitHub

Elixir is a language that has strong support for metaprogramming. It provides easy access to an internal representation of the code in the form of an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) using maps and keyword lists. The quote macro is used to expose this internal representation.

> quote do: 2 * 2
{:*, [context: Elixir, import: Kernel], [2, 2]}
> quote do: 2 * 2 == 4
{:==, [context: Elixir, import: Kernel],
 [{:*, [context: Elixir, import: Kernel], [2, 2]}, 4]}

source