[erlang-questions] some language changes

[ok]

On 31 May 2007, at 11:56 pm, Kenneth Lundin wrote:
> Just for information I can say that we in the OTP team have a clear  
> stategy
> not to use conditional compilation at all for Erlang code. At least
> not for release builds. We tried that in the beginning but found that
> it was a bad idea.
> So, all Erlang code is unconditionally compiled for the release.
> If that is not true it is a bug to be corrected.

Nice policy.
Before going any further, the R11B-4 README file says
"cd otp_src_R11B-0", which is not the right directory any more.
There is a stray ^A character in
lib/mnemosyne/src/mnemosyne_constraint.erl (end of line 64).

The number of -if lines appears to have gone down, from 518 to 381,
but then, I haven't actually installed R11B-4 and many of the
automatically generated -ifndef(..._HRL) things are gone.  The
-ifs that remain are all in "Erlang code", and they remain frequent
in HiPE.

As just one example, there is an
	-ifdef(NOTUSED).
wrapped around the function clear_namedb/2 in code_server.erl.
I guess I don't know what a "release" is; maybe R11B-4 isn't one.
Or maybe the policy is that the -ifs that remain should be such as
won't be _activated_ in releases (*debug* and *test* code, for example).