What are tuples in Erlang?

A tuple is a fixed-size, ordered container written with curly braces, like {ok, 42} or {point, 3, 5}. Once created, its size and the position of each element never change — you build a new tuple rather than mutate an existing one.

Tuples are the standard way to bundle a small, known number of related values, especially as tagged return values:

{ok, Result} = file:read_file("data.txt").
{error, Reason} = file:read_file("missing.txt").

Because the shape is fixed, pattern matching against a tuple is a compile-time-checkable, constant-time operation — the runtime just checks the tag and unpacks the known positions, unlike walking a list.

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