Why should sending somtimes fail

[Johan Montelius]

One thing that I do like in the operational semantics of Erlang is that  
sending a message will not raise an exception even if the receiver is no  
longer alive. It is also very convenient to send directly to a registered  
process by using the atom. However, sending to an atom will now raise an  
exception if there is no process registered under that name. Sending to an  
remote registered process does however not raise an exception.

Could it not be a good idea to skip the exception even if there is no  
process currently registered under the name. In doing so one would have  
the same operational semantics for all four cases: local pid, remote pid,  
local registered, remote registered.

   Johan

-- 
Dr Johan Montelius
Royal Institute of Technology - KTH
School of Information and Communication Technology - ICT