[erlang-questions] OO programming style in Erlang?

[Mats Cronqvist]

Kostis Sagonas wrote:
> Ladislav Lenart wrote:
>> [2]
>> I have an OO experience and I like the basic ideas of encapsulation
>> and polymorphism but can not find a way how to materialize these in
>> my Erlang programs.
>>
>> For example, there are dict and orddict modules which have compatible
>> (polymorphic) interfaces but differ in their implementations. This is
>> essentially good, but when I actually use one of these modules, my
>> code will look like
>>
>>    orddict:new()
>>    orddict:store(...)
>>
>> But this is bad because when I later decide to change (my) implementation
>> I actually have to go through my code and replace orddict with dict. So
>> this is not a polymorphism I am looking for.
> 
> One way of avoiding this problem is the one we follow in various modules
> of the HiPE compiler.  We use the preprocessor as follows:
> 
> -define(DICT, orddict).
> 
> and then write all calls as:
> 
>    ?DICT:new()
>    ?DICT:store(...)
> 
> Not really deep, but it does what we want.


   i personally prefer the import statement in cases like this;

-import(orddict,[new/0,store/3]).

   the code becomes;

   new(),
   store(...)

   mats