Erlang workshop and user conference

[James Hague]

> You find the proceedings from the Erlang/OTP
> user conference in
> 
> http://www.erlang.se/euc/01/

Wow, the Wings project is exciting!  That the graphics calls are implemented
with message passing and even though floating point has never been Erlang's
strong point makes it even more impressive.

On the subject of floating point, I was recently thinking "What if Erlang
had a floating point vector type instead of individual floats?"  Right now,
floats are indepdently heap allocated, so the tuple {1.0, 1.0, 1.0} exists
as four separate data objects.  With a a floating point vector type there
would be one data object.  This would open to door to writing APL-style
vector operations, where 1.0 + |1.0,2.0,3.0| would result in |2.0,3.0,4.0|.
The bare float 1.0 is shorthand for |1.0|.  This would allow really fast 3D
math in Erlang.  (Just add built in operations for normalize, magnitude, dot
and cross products, and this would be amazing.)

Musing, musing...

James