FAQ terminology harmonisation

[Ulf Wiger]

On 1 Apr 2003, Bjorn Gustavsson wrote:

>Actually, we think that Erlang being a functional language
>have scared too many programmers, so we plan some radical
>changes.

And about time too! I've suffered through 11 years of
traditional erlang programming waiting for this!


>The most significant change is that using the thread
>dictionary (formerly known as the "process dictionary"),
>will no longer be considered bad style.

Wonderful!


>To make the thread dictionary easier to use, we will add
>syntactic sugar. Thus
>
>        var := Expr
>
>is syntactic sugar for
>
>        put(var, Expr)
>
>and in any expression
>
>        *var
>
>is syntantic sugar for
>
>        get(var)
>
>Although the ':=' is borrowed from Pascal rather than C, we
>still think that C programmers will pick it up easily
>enough. Many C programmers have used Turbo Pascal in the
>past.

Ah, good old Turbo Pascal. The first programming tool I ever
owned...

Of course, since := and *var will be considered good style,
we could also spend some time optimizing the process (sorry
- thread) dictionary with the help of the compiler. The
compiler could recognize hard-coded process (darn - thread)
dictionary keys and represent them as real global variables.
This will allow use of the (uugh) thread dictionary without
any overhead, and we suddenly have true desctructive
assignment! (: (: (:

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson AB, Connectivity and Control Nodes