The Erlang conventions for names are different—variables start with an uppercase letter and atoms are simple lowercase names. So, for example, the Erlang module timer is called just that, the atom timer. In Elixir we write that as :timer. If you want to refer to the tc function in timer, you’d write :timer.tc. (Note the colon at the start.)
Say we want to output a floating-point number in a three-character-wide field with one decimal place. Erlang has a function for this. A search for erlang format takes us to the description of the format function in the Erlang io module.[10]
Reading the description, we see that Erlang expects us to call io.format. So, in Elixir we simply change the Erlang module name to an Elixir atom:
| | iex> :io.format("The number is ~3.1f~n", [5.678]) |
| | The number is 5.7 |
| | :ok |