1. Records

1 Records

1.1 Records and Tuples

The main advantage of using records rather than tuples is that fields in a record are accessed by name, whereas fields in a tuple are accessed by position. To illustrate these differences, suppose that you want to represent a person with the tuple {Name, Address, Phone}.

To write functions that manipulate this data, remember the following:

• The Name field is the first element of the tuple.
• The Address field is the second element.
• The Phone field is the third element.

For example, to extract data from a variable P that contains such a tuple, you can write the following code and then use pattern matching to extract the relevant fields:

Name = element(1, P),
Address = element(2, P),
...

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