Elixir's data types

We will now describe Elixir's data types, which extend upon Erlang's data types. Elixir is a dynamic programming language. Consequently, you don't declare the type of each variable—it depends on the value it holds at each moment.

To improve the learning experience, we'll be providing some examples along the way. For now, we'll just use Elixir's REPL, IEx (short for Interactive Elixir). To start an IEx session, you must have Elixir installed on your machine. Elixir has an official page with instructions on how to do this if you don't have it installed,  whether using package managers, the precompiled version, or compiling from the source yourself:

http://elixir-lang.github.io/install.html 

Provided that you have Elixir already installed on your machine, type iex on your terminal to start a new IEx session. With this, you can run the examples present in this chapter in your machine. Note that your default iex  prompt contains a number in between parenthesis, which represents the number of expressions you've entered in the current session, such as iex>(1). To declutter the output, in our examples, we've removed this number.

We'll be exploring IEx in greater detail toward the end of this chapter, in the Tooling and ecosystems section. Throughout the following subsections, we'll be mentioning some built-in modules in Elixir. We'll explore what modules are in the Functions and modules section—for now, it's enough to know that a module is a collection of functions.