[erlang-questions] Fwd: newbie distel / general node help

[Toby Thain]

On 28-Feb-07, at 2:28 AM, Mats Cronqvist wrote:

> Raoul Duke wrote:
>>> hi Mats, many thanks for your email. I used 'screen' (since I don't
>>> have X set up) and the ping test works. Some observations:
>>> a) it works real fast if i say net:ping(bla).
>>> b) it works much more slowly if i say net:ping(bla@REDACTED).
>>
>> Wait! I take it all back! Turns out I thought that "pang" was just a
>> funny ha ha foreign version of "pong". Now that I'm looking at the
>> source for net_adm.erl it appears that "pang" really means "error"
>> because there is a "pong" case for {ok, yes}. Moral:
>>
>> a) if "pang" means error, i think "pang" is a pretty misleading thing
>> to be responding with :-) and "error" or "failed" or something like
>> that would be more helpful to newbies.
>
>    yes, that really sucks. fyi, "pang" is the sound cartoon guns  
> makes in
> swedish. i guess way back, when the Erlang user base fit in an  
> elevator, someone
> thought it was funny that ping could return pong (good) or pang  
> (bad). and i
> guess it is kind of funny, but only if you speak swedish...

It's also a vaguely apposite pun in English -- at least, it wasn't  
completely random to me even though I didn't know the Swedish meaning.

--Toby

http://www.answers.com/topic/pang