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I agree Clojure has a better REPL experience than Elixir. But in Elixir REPL for a quick and dirty function you'd probably just do

    >bar = fn x -> x + 1 end
The most unfortunate thing though is then you have to have a different calling convention. Its the greatest flaw in Elixir by far but they didn't have a reasonable alternative given the constraints of Erlang.

Still for defining a named function in the REPL its the same in Haskell and most other languages I believe that you can't define a new named function or add a function to a module in the REPL, though at least in Haskell the calling convention for a variable bound to a lambda is the same as for a named top-level function. LISPs have always had a different notion of how the REPL integrates into the development experience of a running program, and I don't think its really been replicated elsewhere.



Or maybe go with the shorter anonymous function syntax:

bar = &(&1 + 1)


If we're playing code golf, then in Clojure it is:

    (def bar #(+ % 1))
or even

    (def bar inc)
but the difference is that in Clojure, all of these are `IFn`s, and have the same calling syntax, unlike Elixir.


You may be "playing code golf", but I generally just use the capture syntax where the compactness aids readability. For example, a function that takes two arguments and returns their product could be written as

fn x, y -> x * y end

or

&(&1 * &2)

When used inside a map or reduce or when the function is a direct mathematical operation on its arguments, it can be a bit quicker to parse the capture syntax than the fn ... end syntax.




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