[erlang-questions] alternative syntax to '-spec' attributes.

[Kostis Sagonas]

On 01/29/2013 01:49 AM, Eric Merrit wrote:
> There seems to be an alternative syntax for specs. Lets say we have a spec declared in the traditional way
>
> -spec to_boolean(term()) ->  boolean().
>
> We could also declare it the following way and have it be consumed without problems
>
> -spec to_boolean/1 :: (term()) ->  boolean().
>
> I like the second way quite a bit since it visually distinguishes between spec declarations and function declarations better then the traditional syntax. However, I recently went looking for documentation on this and now can't find it. So I am wondering what its status is.

As Antony also mentioned, the :: version is the old spec syntax. It's 
still accepted by the parser, but this is only for reasons of backwards 
compatibility and will most likely become obsolete soon.

Besides a bit more verbose (as you can see from your example), another 
reason to switch to the new one was that the old one required a sanity 
check that the arity specified in the function name actually matches the 
number of argument types specified by the programmer. The newer one does 
not need this.

Kostis