[erlang-questions] Erlang SMTP Client?

[Ahmed Al-Saadi]

On 10/11/11 5:31 AM, Robert Raschke wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:43 AM, Ahmed Al-Saadi 
> <thaterlangguy@REDACTED <mailto:thaterlangguy@REDACTED>> wrote:
>
>     On 10/10/11 5:30 PM, David Mercer wrote:
>
>         On Monday, October 10, 2011, Andrew Thompson wrote:
>         ...
>         ...  I must admit, I am surprised
>
>         there is no SMTP client in the standard distribution.  You
>         would think that
>         would be a fairly common communication protocol...
>         ...
>
>     You will be more surprised to find (almost) no Unicode support in
>     the standard distribution!
>
>     -signed(ahmed).
>
>
> ???
>
> Dealing with Unicode is highly application dependent.
>
> I would say that the majority of code dealing with strings transports 
> them from one place to another, and then binaries and the unicode 
> module are excellent! And for reasonable string manipulation a list of 
> code points (or UTF-8 binaries) are all you will need for a long time.
>
> If you require a deeper understanding of Unicode code points, 
> combining forms, and their visual representations (e.g., when 
> implementing an editor), then you've got a ton more problems. And 
> those are hard problems with more corner cases that you would ever 
> wish for.
>
> Apologies for veering off topic, and probably coming across a wee bit 
> too harsh,
> Robby
I meant to point out that Erlang does not have a Unicode string as a 
first-class citizen that the standard library generally uses as the 
standard input/output. However, I should mention that I find treating 
strings as a list of codepoints (or encoding bytes) to be elegant (read: 
more general, less magical). Coming from a Python background, I was 
surprised (read: confused) by how Erlang dealt with strings. On the plus 
side, I prefer its "closer-to-the-metal" approach to dealing with text 
and encoding, especially when I have extra brain-power to spend on 
understanding how things work ;)

Cheers!
Ahmed
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