Associative arrays

[wboeke@REDACTED]

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From: W.Boeke, Lucent Technologies, boeke@REDACTED
To  : Erlang discussion group, erlang-questions@REDACTED
Date: febr 9, 1999
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Hi,

I asked for associative arrays, got helpful reactions from Tobbe
and Robert, and read Richard's presentation about abstract patterns.

I did not know that the implementaion of records relied on a (dumb)
C preprocessor, but knowing this it is clear that this is not a very
good solution. So I would be happy to use the abstract patterns 
solution once it is implemented and once I understand it.

What I really need is the stepwise creation of a list, where I can
later address the list members by name. These list members themself
might be also associative arrays. So you could envision constructs like

  ape.getmemb('johnie').getmemb('leg').toe2

Things like this are possible with Erlang now (more or less) but
they require a lot of temporal variables.

Kind regards,
Wouter Boeke