While reading Dave Thomas’ Programming Elixir book, I was confused by the following piece of code:

defmodule Users do dave = %{ name: "Dave" , state: "TX" , likes: "programming" } case dave do %{ state: some_state } = person -> IO . puts " #{ person . name } lives in #{ some_state } " _ -> IO . puts "No matches" end end

My problem was understanding line 5: %{state: some_state} = person . How could the person variable get its value, if it was on the right side of the assignment?

A digression on Pattern Matching

Now, if you’re not familiar with Elixir, you might not know that in it, the = operator is not exactly an assignment. What it is instead, is an operator for Pattern Matching.

If you recall basic math classes from school, you might remember that x = 1 didn’t mean “assign the value 1 to the variable x”. It meant: both sides of the equation are equal. Saying that x = 1 implied that 1 = x.

Now, in imperative languages, this is not the case. To take an example from Ruby, if you try and run 1 = x , you’ll get an error (albeit a very cryptic one):

irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > 1 = x SyntaxError : ( irb ): 1 : syntax error , unexpected '=' , expecting end - of - input 1 = x ^

Which is Ruby basically telling you that it’s not expecting an assignment after an integer.

In Elixir, the = operator works like it does in algebra:

iex ( 1 ) > x = 1 1 iex ( 2 ) > 1 = x 1

In other words, Elixir tries to pattern-match (according to rules which are outside the scope of this article) the left hand of the equation with its right hand. If it succeeds, it returns the value of the equation. If it fails, it throws an error.

This allows us to effectively bind values to variables, like we did above. What we cannot do, however, is introduce variables on the right hand side of an assignment/pattern-matching/equation.

So if I try to do 1 = x for an uninitialized variable x , Elixir will complain:

iex ( 1 ) > 1 = x ** ( CompileError ) iex : 1 : undefined function x / 0

End of digression

So, how could it be that we could run %{state: some_state} = person ?

The point is that I was focusing on the wrong part of the expression, which structurally is of the form:

left -> right # %{state: some_state} = person -> IO.puts "..."

The -> operator mandates that its left side hand be a pattern. So the whole expression %{state: some_state} = person is a pattern.

And when you’re assigning inside a pattern match, the side of the assignment does not matter.

For example, you can do (1 = x) = 1 , and it won’t throw an error. Or, as José himself explained, you could run [ h = 1 | t ] = [ 1,2,3 ] . Or [ 1 = h | t ] = [ 1,2,3 ] , for that matter.

This is called “Nested pattern matching” in Dave Thomas’ book, but I’m not sure how widely adopted this term is.