Working with collections

Contrary to the most common programming languages, Elixir doesn't have while or do ... while constructs, which makes sense, given all data types are immutable. The way to iterate in Elixir is by using recursion, through functions that call themselves. Most of your needs when working with collections are covered by the high-level abstractions Elixir provides, meaning that you may barely use recursion when writing your Elixir applications.

Nevertheless, we'll begin this section by briefly describing recursion, and show an example of a recursive function in Elixir. Then, we'll see how we can process a collection using the Enum module, and finish the section by talking about the benefits of processing a collection lazily, and how to do it using the Stream module.