One of the new hot topic items in Erlang R17 is maps. In Ruby you would call them a hashes, PHP calls them associative arrays, no matter what you call them it’s the same idea: key-value pairs. Back in the “Good old days” :tm: an Erlang programmer would need to leverage a record to get the same functionality. While records are very good and carry benifit they lack some of the flexibility found in maps.

Defining a map is pretty strait forward. The #{ starts it off and then is followed by any number of key => value pairs that are seperated by commas before being terminated by the lonely }.

Spot = #{breed => "Mutt", age => 5, color => "Tan"}.

Lets say we want to build a fun that will up the age by one, to do so we could write it like this:

OneYearOlder = fun(Dog = #{age := N}) when is_integer(N) -> Dog#{age := N + 1} end.
OneYearOlder(Spot). % => #{breed => "Mutt", age => 5, color => "Tan"}

It is important to know the differance between the := and => operators.

:= will only work for pattern matching or updating a key from a map that has that key already defined. As in this example the brightness value cannot be updated from sun as it was not one of the original values.

Sun = #{age => "Pretty darn old", size => "Huge!" }.
Sun#{brightness := "Insanely Bright"}.
% ** exception error: bad argument
%      in function  maps:update/3
%         called as maps:update(brightness,"Insanely Bright",
%                               #{age => "Pretty darn old",size => "Huge!"})
%      in call from erl_eval:'-expr/5-fun-0-'/2 (erl_eval.erl, line 255)
%      in call from lists:foldl/3 (lists.erl, line 1261)

=> can be used to initialize, add, or update map values.

Sun = #{age => "Pretty darn old", size => "Huge!" }.
Sun#{brightness => "Insanely Bright"}.
%=> #{age => "Pretty darn old", size => "Huge!", brightness => "Insanely Bright" }