[erlang-questions] some language changes

[Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB)]

Christian S wrote:
> 
> On 5/23/07, Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB) <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
> > 1> md("
> > -module(foo).
> > ...
> > plus(A,B) -> A+B.
> > ").
> > {module, foo}
> 
> Isnt this horribly annoying when you have string litterals in 
> the module you are defining?

Yeah, sure, but this was supposed to be the first step.
There are two parts of the problem:

1) Making the shell keep information about interpreted
   modules, much as it does with records today
2) Finding nifty ways of entering the module definition.

By far the easiest way to be done with (1) is to accept
the current behaviour of the shell's line editor. And,
yes, it would be inconvenient with escape codes etc, but
it would work.

> How about following the idea from unix shells:
> 
> cat <<EOF
> dobido
> blah...
> sim salabim
> EOF

Regardless of whether the shell supports module definitions,
I (and especially Mats Cronqvist, I believe) would like to
see better support for editing insanely complex one-liners
in the shell (multi-line editing would be a great help).

Today, if you insert line breaks into a command, the 
repeated occurences of the prompt destroys your chances
of copying and pasting the expression without post-
processing. This leaves you with writing expressions that 
wrap several times, and they are a bear to edit (esp. with
broken terminal windows).

BR,
Ulf W