[erlang-questions] Status of map pair support in dialyzer

[José Valim]

That's excellent news Kostis!

I have only one question/reservation:

Another problem is related to the meaning of #{}. One would expect that
this notation means "the empty map," but instead it means "any map".


#{} in pattern matching also means "any map", so it may be confusing to
have #{} in specs to mean the empty map, specially because both usages are
often close to each other. For example:

-spec increment(term(), #{}) -> #{}

increment(Key, #{} = Map) ->

  Map#{Key := maps:get(Key, Map) + 1}.

I also understand that [] and {} in typespecs implies emptiness and making
#{} mean "the empty map" would make the typespecs more consistent.

That said, maybe it would be better to not allow #{} altogether
(deprecating it now and removing it later) and introduce an empty_map()
construct? The empty_map() type is slightly more verbose but I don't expect
it to be used frequently and, as such, the more explicit name is worth it.
And if I understand the proposal correctly, both map() and #{_ => _} can
still be used to represent any map, while #{_ := _} represents a non-empty
map, so it feels all of our bases are covered.

Thank you,



*José Valim*
www.plataformatec.com.br
Skype: jv.ptec
Founder and Director of R&D

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Kostis Sagonas <kostis@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 03/04/2016 11:59 AM, Björn-Egil Dahlberg XB wrote:
>
>>
>> I did the initial work for maps in Dialyzer but that application is not
>> really part of my work area. If you want to contribute to Dialyzer you
>> should probably talk to Hans Bolinder, Kostis Sagonas and/or Stavros
>> Aronis. Hans talked about increasing Dialyzers knowledge about map
>> associations the other day but I don't think it is on his agenda at the
>> moment.
>>
>> I don't think it will be supported in 19.0 either though I have no clue
>> if Kostis or Stavros, or anyone else for that matter, is working on it.
>>
>
>
> Hijacking this thread to announce a proposal for a change in the type
> syntax related to maps.
>
> The relevant document is here:
>
>   https://gist.github.com/kostis/eaf4a06e643cf49314ba
>
> We would appreciate feedback from the community at this point.
>
> The intention is for this change to be part of Erlang/OTP 19.0.
>
>
> Kostis
>
> PS. Most of the credit for this change goes to Magnus Lång.
>
> PS2. For those that would like to experiment with the new type syntax and
> use the new version of dialyzer, or just fancy reading code diffs, there is
> also a related pull request that implements all these:
>
>   https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/1014
>
>
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