Arrays vs tuples / lists

[Tony Rogvall]

tisdagen den 18 maj 2004 kl 17.23 skrev Carsten Schultz:

> Sorry, I must have been half asleep :-)
>
> I then modify my statement that I would be worried if
>     [X|_] = List
> was less efficient than
>     X = head(List).
>
> Indeed I would hope both to produce exactly the same code.
>
They can not generate the SAME code, since

hd(x)	will crash with badarg

and

[X|_] = x	will crash with badmatch

by running erlc -S you can inspect what kind of code is generated, for 
BEAM the loader
phase has to be taken into account (where Björn G has added some 
transformations)
I could however not find any transformations for hd/1 and tl/1 and 
assume we
have to live with the match version for best speed (if not badarg is 
wanted in the crash case)

Regards

/Tony