[erlang-questions] A modest proposal to eliminate tuples

[Dmitry Kolesnikov]

On Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet... Celebrated by local trolls...

Best Regards,
Dmitry
>-|-|-(*>

> On 27 Aug 2014, at 21:40, Sean Cribbs <sean@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Must be April 1 somewhere.
> 
>> On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Anthony Ramine <n.oxyde@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Are we 1st April already? I didn’t implement yet my patch to make tuples 0-indexed. :(
>> 
>> But well, that is overseded by your proposal.
>> 
>> --
>> Anthony Ramine
>> 
>>> Le 27 août 2014 à 20:21, Chris Pacejo <colanderman@REDACTED> a écrit :
>>> 
>>> Tuples are clearly unnecessary and a wart in Erlang's design.
>>> Consider all the operations tuples provide:
>>> 
>>> Construction: X = {A,B,C}
>>> Destruction: {A,B,C} = X
>>> Pattern matching: case X of {foo,B,C} -> ... end
>>> 
>>> Note now that these operations are provided equally by lists:
>>> 
>>> Construction: X = [A,B,C]
>>> Destruction: [A,B,C] = X
>>> Pattern matching: case X of [foo,B,C] -> ... end
>>> 
>>> And note that lists provide the additional functionality of indexing
>>> and consing, which tuples do not provide.
>>> 
>>> Clearly, using tuples instead of lists provides no benefit, and to
>>> simplify the language they should be deprecated in OTP 18, and removed
>>> by OTP 19.  To support this transition, a compiler option can be
>>> provided to maintain the ill-conceived tuple notation for legacy code;
>>> may I suggest +distinguish_homogenous_and_heterogenous_collections.
>>> 
>>> Now, surely detractors will claim that the distinction between tuples
>>> and lists signals programmer intent, permits bytecode optimization,
>>> and enables rich typechecking in Dialyzer.  I claim these purported
>>> benefits are bollocks.  I, and no doubt others, routinely find the
>>> need to iterate over tuple elements, and to store unrelated data
>>> together in a single list.  Anyone who claims that such things are not
>>> necessary clearly has not ever written a complex program.  (I suspect
>>> anyone who thinks structurally-typed records and key-value maps serve
>>> different purposes falls into this group.)
>>> 
>>> I hope you all agree, and that we can look forward to a future Erlang
>>> supporting lists and maps as its sole data constructors.
>>> 
>>> - Chris P
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>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Sean Cribbs <sean@REDACTED>
> Software Engineer
> Basho Technologies, Inc.
> http://basho.com/
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