[erlang-questions] Pmods, packages, Unicode source code and column numbers in compiler - what will happen in R16?

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 18/10/2012, at 8:55 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu wrote:
> 
> If the package feature is dropped, does this mean that the associated
> lexical rule for atom names is also dropped? I would like to have it
> removed too, as the dot character is already overloaded and makes
> lexers harder to implement.

Dots were allowed in atom names long before packages were dreamed of.
The idea is that main.node@REDACTED can be an atom without
needing quotes.

I've written a couple of lexical analysers for Erlang, and it's not
_that_ hard.  Leaving @ out of the discussion,
	variable = [_[:upper:]][_[:alnum:]]*
	atom = [.]?[[:lower:]]([[:digit:]]|[_[:upper:]]|[.]?[[:lower:]])*
with the added weirdness that a leading "." is discarded.