records

[Fredrik Linder]

From: "Thomas Lindgren" <thomas.lindgren@REDACTED>
>
> I get the following very undesirable behaviour for
> records.
>
> The program is enclosed as an attachment (my apologies).
> Run test:bar/0. Under R7B1 and R8B0, I get the answer
> {"aaa", "aaa"}, which means a record of type rec1 is
> mistakenly thought to be a record of type rec2.
>
> (Furthermore, since the fields have the same names, but a transposed
> order, you also get a nasty return value on top of that.)
>
> Looking at the BEAM code, the basic problem is that
> the code doesn't verify that Rec is a record of
> the proper type before accessing it. (That is, it doesn't
> check that the incoming tuple has the proper arity and
> "tag".)
>
> -- Thomas
>

The undesirable behaviour that I guess was Thomas' point is the optimization
that record access is not checked (in runtime) to be performed only on
tuples that have the correct first element and the correct tuple size,
generating a runtime error otherwise.

That seems have been forgotten in the following discussion.

/Fredrik

PS. Sorry if this was too obvious DS.