the Hopwood design process

[David Hopwood]

chandru wrote:
> On 14/03/06, Thomas Lindgren <thomasl_erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>>Anyway, let me add two things to the new features
>>discussion.
>>
>>First, pragmatically speaking, it might be useful to
>>release some features as "experimental", with the
>>explicit proviso that they can be modified or perhaps
>>even removed in the future, until classified as
>>"stable". This allows for community feedback without
>>locking into a given design beforehand.
> 
> This is quite easily done when new libraries are being introduced
> which do not need any special support from the runtime system. But
> when you are talking about a new language feature such as this I guess
> it becomes very hard because you've got to change the compiler, beam,
> debugger and heavens knows what else - all in one go. To do that in a
> non commital way can be very hard?

In the E language, experimental features are enabled or disabled using
pragmas. For some examples see
<http://www.erights.org/download/0-8-25/highlights.html>.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>