[erlang-questions] Why do we need modules at all?

[Joe Armstrong]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED>wrote:

> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 07:58, Vance Shipley <vances@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> I love the idea of ditching modules files and storing functions
>> in a data store.  What I'm picturing though is that the functions
>> are stored in their abstract syntax form (i.e. data) so that the
>> issue of formatting standards is stripped away.
>
> <snip>
>>
>>
>> The problem with that plan seems to be with the preprocessor.  It
>> seems to me though that your plan suffers the same problem.  If
>> macros are defined at a module level, or in an include file, you'll
>> have to deal with them when you pull the functions out of the module
>> and stuff it into the data store.  The extended syntax tree used in
>> the erl_syntax application might be the answer.
>>
>
> There are more things that need to be preserved by the parser, which make
> existing pretty-printers less than good. For example:
>
> - integer values can be shown using different bases, from case to case, so
> one can't use a generic setting. So the parser needs to keep track of that.
>

The new parser/tokeniser does I'm not sure if its worked its way in the
pretty printers - I do have
some unpublished code that does exact colorization of the source program


> - comments have to be anchored somewhere in the code. erl_syntax guesses
> only almost right. Of course, if there is going to be a more advanced
> metadata mechanism, the comments belong there too.
>
> Also, I didn't understand where/how are record and macro definitions going
> to be stored and identified. As somebody else said it too, the best solution
> would be to get rid of them altogether and it's starting to look more and
> more like a different language :-)
>
> regards,
> Vlad
>
>
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