Enhanced type guard syntax]

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

While I'm no guru, I'll give my 2c

From: "Peter-Henry Mander"
> If you _need_ to know what type of parameter is being given as an
> argument, would it be more explicit and practical to simply use tagged
> tuples?
>
>  > is  f(X) when list(integer(X)) ->
>  > a good notation to express that X should be a list of integers?
>
> perhaps this:
>
>      f({list_of_integers,X}) ->
>
> will provide a strong enough guard to to prevent illegal use of this
> function.

The idea is certainly interesting, but one problem that I can see is that one
has to either

- return {list_of_integers, Value} from all functions that compute such a beast

or

- be forced to write
        Result = fun_that_returns_a_list_of_integers(),
        f({list_of_integers, Result}),
  instead of
        f(fun_that_returns_a_list_of_integers()),

The big advantage of using the real types and not tags is that they are present
in the runtime, while invisible in the code.

regards,
Vlad