[erlang-questions] Funs!

[Håkan Stenholm]

Chad Wilson wrote:
> I have programmed my first function in Erlang!
>
> It just had to get that off my chest.  I felt it was an accomplishment
> worth drinking a Pepsi for because I remembered that capitalization
> part.  Speaking of which, why case sensitive language parts?  Does it
> make designing the parser and compiler easier?  Reading the code?
> Something else?
>
>   
It may partly be a inheritance from the orginal erlang implementation, 
that was based on Prolog.
Prolog uses upper case to mark something as a varibale.

It is also probably a parser/complier issue, it might otherwise be hard 
to distinguish variables from atoms, as well as differentiate a regular 
function call like foo(...) from the function call Foo(...) (where Foo 
is a fun()).
Other languages like bash (and PHP ?) that have no or only rarely used 
constructs to declare variables, also act in a similar manner - bash for 
example requires $VarName to get the value of a varible rather than just 
the string VarName.