Constant lists

James Hague jhague@REDACTED
Mon Jun 26 05:06:16 CEST 2000


In Erlang, if you want to have a constant, medium-sized list, what's the 
best way of dealing with it?  In Lisp, for example, you use defparameter 
to define a list and then reference it when you need it.

In Erlang, you could do this:

constant_list() -> [item1, item2, item3, item4, ...].

but then that list is actually created each time you call it, which is 
messy.  It's not really a constant in this case.  For association lists, 
you could code it in a Prolog style:

name(john) -> 7;
name(bjorn) -> 3;
name(james) -> 9.

but this isn't general.  Or, you could read the term from disk, but then 
only the current process has access to it.  Putting it in a global ets 
table results in the list being copied each time it is fetched.

Sure would be nice to have honest-to-goodness constant lists and tuples.  
Any thoughts?

James



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