Elixir 1.3 introduced a new sigil for creating dates, ~D. It works in the
same way as Date's
new/3
function producing the Date struct with each of the date parts.
> ~D[2016-01-01]
~D[2016-01-01]
> ~D[2016-01-01].year
2016
> ~D[2016-01-01].month
1
> ~D[2016-01-01].day
1