[erlang-questions] an erlang "gotcha"

[Julian Fondren]

On 4/5/07, Anthony Shipman <als@REDACTED> wrote:
> Is there a place where difficulties with erlang and their solutions are
> described? Perhaps another page at Trapexit.

I don't know of one, but this series that I did while learning Mercury,

  http://community.livejournal.com/mercury_blog/2007/02/

really helped me; and I still think it a cool idea.  I don't find
Erlang's error messages formidable enough to repeat this, however,
and Erlang errors -- as in your example -- would need to extend
farther beyond static compilation errors than needed in Mercury.

> Here's one that got me.
>
> It prints out "it failed". If you change the 'and' to 'andalso' it works.

1> { is_pid(self()), [1,2] /= [],
     if is_pid(self()) and [1,2] /= [] -> 1; true -> 2 end,
     if is_pid(self()) andalso [1,2] /= [] -> 1; true -> 2 end }.
{true,true,2,1}
2> { is_pid(self()), [1,2] /= [],
     if is_pid(self()) and ([1,2] /= []) -> 1; true -> 2 end,
     if is_pid(self()) andalso ([1,2] /= []) -> 1; true -> 2 end }.
{true,true,1,1}
3> is_pid(self()) and ([1,2] /= []).
true
4> is_pid(self()) and [1,2] /= [].

=ERROR REPORT==== 4-Apr-2007::15:38:44 ===
...


Odd.