Stream: An amount of something or a number of things coming in a continuous flow. For example: a constant stream of enquiries; this new service has created a new stream of revenue for the company.
Enumerate: Mention a number of things one by one. More formally, it can mean: “establish the number of”. For example: 6,079 residents were enumerated in 241 establishments.
Elixir provides Stream and Enum modules out of the box for working with enumerables. Enumerables can be lists, maps, ranges or any other type that implements the Enumerable protocol. Enumerables can be enumerated in an eager manner (using Enum module), or lazily / on-demand (using Stream module).
Here we’ll learn about the Enum module first.
# Let's take a list of 10 numbers. Since a list is an
# Enumerable, so we can use Enum and Stream modules.
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
Functions that need to check the entire enumerable will definitely be in Enum module. Such functions include, but are not limited to:
all?, any?, empty?randomcount, sum, product, min, maxreverse, sort, shuffle# Check if all numbers are greater than 0 (returns true)
numbers |> Enum.all?(fn number -> number > 0 end)
# OR (we can use this shorthand form)
numbers |> Enum.all?(&(&1 > 0))
# Check if all numbers are multiples of 2 (returns false)
numbers |> Enum.all?(&(rem(&1, 2) == 0))
numbers |> Enum.sum # => 55
numbers |> Enum.count # => 10
numbers |> Enum.product # => 3628800
numbers |> Enum.min # => 1
numbers |> Enum.max # => 10
Which module will contain the functions related to sorting? Enum module, because sorting functions need to process the entire enumerable to generate their results.
numbers |> Enum.sort # => Default sorting
numbers |> Enum.sort(:desc) # => Descending order (:desc)
# Give a comparison function that takes two numbers
# and returns a boolean
numbers |> Enum.sort(&(&1 >= &2))