Why are there two kinds of functions in Elixir?

Question

I'm learning Elixir and wonder why it has two types of function definitions:

• functions defined in a module with def, called using myfunction(param1, param2)
• anonymous functions defined with fn, called using myfn.(param1, param2)

Only the second kind of function seems to be a first-class object and can be passed as a parameter to other functions. A function defined in a module needs to be wrapped in a fn. There's some syntactic sugar which looks like otherfunction(&myfunction(&1, &2)) in order to make that easy, but why is it necessary in the first place? Why can't we just do otherfunction(myfunction))? Is it only to allow calling module functions without parenthesis like in Ruby? It seems to have inherited this characteristic from Erlang which also has module functions and funs, so does it actually comes from how the Erlang VM works internally?

It there any benefit having two types of functions and converting from one type to another in order to pass them to other functions? Is there a benefit having two different notations to call functions?

Answer 1

Just to clarify the naming, they are both functions. One is a named function and the other is an anonymous one. But you are right, they work somewhat differently and I am going to illustrate why they work like that.

Let's start with the second, fn. fn is a closure, similar to a lambda in Ruby. We can create it as follows:

x = 1
fun = fn y -> x + y end
fun.(2) #=> 3

A function can have multiple clauses too:

x = 1
fun = fn
  y when y < 0 -> x - y
  y -> x + y
end
fun.(2) #=> 3
fun.(-2) #=> 3

Now, let's try something different. Let's try to define different clauses expecting a different number of arguments:

fn
  x, y -> x + y
  x -> x
end
** (SyntaxError) cannot mix clauses with different arities in function definition

Oh no! We get an error! We cannot mix clauses that expect a different number of arguments. A function always has a fixed arity.

Now, let's talk about the named functions:

def hello(x, y) do
  x + y
end

As expected, they have a name and they can also receive some arguments. However, they are not closures:

x = 1
def hello(y) do
  x + y
end

This code will fail to compile because every time you see a def, you get an empty variable scope. That is an important difference between them. I particularly like the fact that each named function starts with a clean slate and you don't get the variables of different scopes all mixed up together. You have a clear boundary.

We could retrieve the named hello function above as an anonymous function. You mentioned it yourself:

other_function(&hello(&1))

And then you asked, why I cannot simply pass it as hello as in other languages? That's because functions in Elixir are identified by name and arity. So a function that expects two arguments is a different function than one that expects three, even if they had the same name. So if we simply passed hello, we would have no idea which hello you actually meant. The one with two, three or four arguments? This is exactly the same reason why we can't create an anonymous function with clauses with different arities.

Since Elixir v0.10.1, we have a syntax to capture named functions:

&hello/1

That will capture the local named function hello with arity 1. Throughout the language and its documentation, it is very common to identify functions in this hello/1 syntax.

This is also why Elixir uses a dot for calling anonymous functions. Since you can't simply pass hello around as a function, instead you need to explicitly capture it, there is a natural distinction between named and anonymous functions and a distinct syntax for calling each makes everything a bit more explicit (Lispers would be familiar with this due to the Lisp 1 vs. Lisp 2 discussion).

Overall, those are the reasons why we have two functions and why they behave differently.