[erlang-questions] More a comment that a question

[Bob Ippolito]

That's not really pattern matching, it's just destructuring assignment.

On Friday, June 8, 2012, Tom Murphy wrote:

> Forgot the list:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Tom Murphy" <amindfv@REDACTED <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'amindfv@REDACTED');>>
> Date: Jun 8, 2012 9:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] More a comment that a question
> To: "Adam Rutkowski" <adam.rutkowski@REDACTED <javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'adam.rutkowski@REDACTED');>>
>
> Python has some basic pattern-matching, eg:
>
> (a, b) = ("foo", "bar")
>
> Tom
> On Jun 8, 2012 1:47 PM, "Adam Rutkowski" <adam.rutkowski@REDACTED<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'adam.rutkowski@REDACTED');>>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jun 8, 2012, at 7:37 PM, Eric Moritz wrote:
>>
>> > Where the danger comes in is mutating object, lists and dicts that
>> other threads or functions have references to.  It is possible to have a
>> reference to a dict in a module or up the call stack that gets changed in
>> an unexpected way and things crash.  Erlang has made me a very paranoid
>> Python developer.
>>
>> I let my Python code crash and I always regret it.
>> Not to mention trivial indecisions like 'how should I deal with this
>> without pattern matching?'.
>>
>> Thanks Erlang!
>>
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Bob Ippolito <bob@REDACTED<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'bob@REDACTED');>>
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Paul Barry <paul.james.barry@REDACTED<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'paul.james.barry@REDACTED');>>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > I've been coding/working with Erlang (and Chicago Boss) for a while
>> > now, and I've recently had to do some work in Python.  I find myself
>> > looking at some code I'm writing that looks like this:
>> >
>> >   html = html + "some markup"
>> >
>> > and getting nervous as I know this is a "naughty" that Erlang would
>> > not let me away with.   If only there was a "make everything
>> > immutable" switch for Python!  ;-)
>> >
>> > Strictly speaking, there's no mutation at all here, because str in
>> Python *are* immutable. What's happening is that the variable html is
>> rebound to the result. This is roughly equivalent to something like this in
>> Erlang [1]:
>> >
>> >     HTML1 = <<HTML/binary, "some markup">>.
>> >
>> > You really wouldn't want to have to write Python in single assignment
>> form, especially without tail call optimization. Python IO would benefit
>> from something like Erlang's iolist, but for use cases like the above
>> people tend to append to a list and then join it with the empty string, or
>> use an instance of cStringIO.StringIO.
>> >
>> > [1] Some versions of CPython do have some hacks that can detect this x
>> += s where x is a string with a reference count of 1 and strategically do
>> these updates in-place with over-allocation... so it's possible that it's
>> not quite as bad as you think it is (amortized).
>> >
>> > -bob
>> >
>> >
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>> >
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>> --
>> AR
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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