Structs

[Ulf Wiger]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, James Hague wrote:

>>What about cond (or something like it)?
>>Isn't that coming soon to Erlang?
>
>I was always under the impression that the reason records
>were never replaced with something neater was because there
>was little incentive to go in and fiddle with the core
>language.

Until fairly recently, and at the time when records were
added to the language, it would have been a huge undertaking
to records "right", since there were not more type tags to
use.

Rest assured that the internal discussions about the
proposed record syntax were quite animated (Erlang was not
Open Source back then.) At the end, the proposed solution
did address some real problems (while introducing some new
ones), and I think that it was a reasonable tradeoff.

As of R7 (I think), Erlang has a new tagging system (thanks
to the HIPE group), and adding a 'struct' type would be
quite feasible.

Reforming records has been on the agenda since the
possibility arose to do it right. Now, what constitutes the
"right" way of replacing records has been discussed a few
times. For a while, Richard O'Keefe's abstract patterns
looked promising.

Now, Joe's structs look more promising, but we need to work
out what the syntax and semantics should really be, and make
sure that we don't replace records with something that will
be subject to the same discussions a few years from now.

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson Telecom AB, ATM Multiservice Networks