[erlang-questions] Package Support/Use

[Christian S]

On 11/6/06, Bob Ippolito <bob@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 11/6/06, Mats Cronqvist <mats.cronqvist@REDACTED> wrote:
> > Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> > > Dominic Williams <xpdoka@REDACTED> wrote:
> > >       - returning tagged values vs. throwing
> >    i hope you misremember, cause returning tagged tuples is truly abominable.
> > only a closet C programmer would use that idiom.

How are tagged tuples bad? How do one reason for such an opinion?

I share the despise for C programming nowdays, but there I learned to
love sprinkling assert() sanity checks all over the code. They caught
so many errors that I thought were impossible.

I find that tagged tuples does much of the same for me in Erlang.
Crash as soon as possible when code derails off what I intended it to
do. Nor do I find this to exclude the use of throwing exceptions.

With the terminology of "top-down programming", I find that exceptions
are good for the "top" part of a program, exceptions that indicate
that some stage went wrong (ex failure to read config, sql database
could not be connected to...) and tagged tuples + pattern matching are
good for the "bottom" part of programming, code that implement the
different stages.