[erlang-questions] Typed records and erl_parse

[Robert Virding]

The trouble is you don't know who will suffer. Not everyone is on the 
mailing list. Or there might be some piece of old code which happily 
chugs along doing what it is supposed to until one day it crashes 
because someone pulls the rug out from under its feet.

Why not leave the old one as it is and add a new record_declaration 
attribute? And a function_declaration attribute as well while you are at 
it as that seems to be the way the wind is blowing.

Robert

Tobias Lindahl wrote:
> Short version:
> 
> Who would suffer if we changed the format of the record attribute given 
> by erl_parse?
> 
> Slightly longer version:
> 
> We are experimenting with adding type annotations in record declarations 
> in order to make use of them in the Dialyzer. Since we don't want to 
> keep this in a separate declaration we have changed our version of the 
> erl_parse to have a different representation of the record attribute.
> 
> In principle, the format of the record attribute can be made backwards 
> compatible, but we forsee some future problems in keeping different 
> formats of the current records and their typed counterparts, so we would 
> really like to make them the same attribute whether they have type 
> information or not.
> 
> Of course, we also have to change some parts of the compiler in order to 
> make this work, but before we go about and do these changes we would 
> like to know if there are people out there (outside of the compiler) who 
> rely on the format of what the erl_parse gives you for records.
> 
> So, again. Who would suffer if we changed the format of the record 
> attribute given by erl_parse?
> 
> Tobias
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