[erlang-questions] Here's hoping we get frames or structs in 2009!

[Kostis Sagonas]

James Hague wrote:
> I've been using Erlang as my primary language for personal projects
> for some years now, though I also use and enjoy Perl, Python, REBOL,
> C++, Lua, and occasionally Forth.  Quite often I'm surprised at how
> much easier it is write certain types of code in Erlang...and I'm also
> surprised at how awkward it is to write other types of code in Erlang.
>  Sometimes the awkwardness is because I just can't think of a pretty
> way to avoid destructive updates in an algorithm that's inherently
> destructive.  But much of the time it's from working around the lack
> of lightweight dictionaries or hashes.
> 
> In Perl, I don't think twice about creating hashes:
> 
>    (width => 1280, height => 1024, colors=655536)
> 
> The Python version is similarly clean:
> 
>    dict(width=1280, height=1024, colors=65536)
> 
> In Erlang, I can create a property list:
> 
>    [{width,1280}, {height,1024}, {colors,65536}]
> 
> which isn't bad in itself, but not being able to pattern match on
> these is what hurts.I work around it by manually grabbing properties,
> but the code ends up bulky and contrived.  Yeah, we've all discussed
> this for years, so here's hoping there's some movement on this front.
> Syntactically, the version I like the most at the moment is the record
> syntax without a record name:
> 
>    #{width=1280, height=1024, colors=65536}

Perhaps I am missing the obvious but I fail to see how the presence of 
the record name prevents you from doing this today -- especially for 
things that have a fixed number of "properties" (e.g. width, height, 
colors) as the above.

Kostis