Erlang as Functional Language

Matias Hernandez m.hernandez@REDACTED
Fri May 5 11:47:05 CEST 2000


Hello. 

I am really new to Erlang/OTP. In a "Languages and Compilers" course at
the University we've been told to work with a few functional languages,
Erlang among them. I would like to know whether it has some of the
functionalities present in other functional languages, such as Haskell,
ML, etc. We can't jump ship now, anyway, so I hope it is a good pick :)

I know the main focus of Erlang and its "core" design is communications
and real-time processes, so I understand this could be considered a bit
off-topic... I hope I'm not pestering you.

So, on to the questions:

1. In most functional languages there is a "map" function used for
applying a certain operation on all the elements of a list. 
Like, map(*2, L) doubles all the members of list L. Is there an
equivalent for this in Erlang? How is it used?

2. Does Erlang support lazy evaluation?

3. Parsing. Erlang has something similar to yacc, from what I've seen. I
could really use something like that. Is it well developed?

Thanks for your comments.

Best regards,
- Matias Hernandez





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