[erlang-questions] Ideas for a new Erlang

[Darren New]

Ulf Wiger wrote:
> One of the nice aspects of channels is that you cannot consume
> a message from a channel unless you have its handle. This means
> that you can be sure that a function that has not been passed a
> channel reference cannot remove messages from it.

Except that you either make a channel reference unlike every other datum 
in Erlang, or you can't really guarantee this. If you can do 
term_to_binary on a structure holding a channel, and get back a valid 
reference when you unwrap it, or if you can send a channel reference in 
a message, then any function might have a reference to that channel. 
It's not something easy for the *compiler* to guarantee, certainly 
without global knowledge of the entire program.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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