Importance of Index with Tuples¶

Next step in the Cards module is to implement a deal method. That deals n cards from a deck. This can be done by using the Enum.split method.

def deal(deck, hand_size) do
    Enum.split(deck, hand_size)
end

You can see that the output of the method is wrapped with {}, the first element is the cards dealt and the second list is the cards left.

The {} represents a data structure called a tuple. The hand is always at the index of 0, the rest of the cards are at index 1.

Essentially, a list is for a list of similar records, meanwhile the tuple is for stuff that can be in different types, but the order has some specific meaning.