[erlang-questions] style question - best way to test multiple non-guard conditions sequentially

[Jonathan Leivent]

On 06/20/2013 06:07 PM, Anthony Ramine wrote:
> I don't believe they do in places where guards are the only inhabitant.
>
> I do believe they violate it in comprehensions; call these two functions with [foo]:
>
> 	F = fun (L) -> [ X || X <- L,     X rem 2 =:= 0 ],
> 	G = fun (L) -> [ X || X <- L, _ = X rem 2 =:= 0 ].
>
> Regards,
>

You omitted the "end"s - but you obviously didn't mean to do that.

OK - so you just blew my mind.  What is happening here?  Let me see if I 
can explain it:

In F, the "X rem 2" guard fails because X is not an integer - but it is 
in a guard context, so no error is produced, the guard just evaluates to 
false, and F([foo]) returns [].

In G, the "X rem 2" is in the rhs of an "assignment" - really a match 
expression: that is no longer a guard context, so G([foo]) produces an 
error instead.

Does that sound right?

Personally, I would stay away from using this 
false-not-error-on-bad-type behavior of guards that are not patterns. 
It's easy enough to use the is_type BIFs to make the meaning explicit 
and far less astonishing:

H = fun (L) -> [X || X <- L, is_integer(X), X rem 2 =:= 0] end.

But, then I'm writing Erlang code that I expect to be read and 
understood by non-Erlang programmers.

Is Dialyzer (or some other lint-like Erlang tool) customizable?  If so, 
I'd like to add a customization that flags such cases for my own use.

-- Jonathan