[erlang-questions] How to keep adding items to a data structure

[Donald Steven]

Thanks Oliver, I appreciate your note. I understand that a list can 
contain different elements, as you've indicated.  That's wonderful! And 
I have that book on order.  What I'm so frustrated by is, apparently, in 
order to extend a list by adding new musical events, that I have to keep 
creating new lists, like:

List1 = [musical-event],
List2 = List1 ++ [new-musical-event],
List3 = List2 ++ [new-musical-event],
List4 = List3 ++ [new-musical-event],
etc.

all the way to perhaps a few thousand.  This is primitive and absurd.  I 
need a better solution, whether it's a list or an array or a record.

Don

On 04/24/2016 05:05 PM, Oliver Korpilla wrote:
> Hello, Donald.
>
> Lists are not fixed to one type like arrays in C are.
>   
> [[1,2,3],"hello",5,world] is a valid Erlang expression, even though the list contains another list, a string, a number, and an atom.
>
> You might want to read a book like "Programming Erlang" to get into the language. I highly recommend it, it really helped laying down the basics and understand the design principles of the OTP shipped with Erlang.
>
> Cheers,
> Oliver
>   
>
> Gesendet: Sonntag, 24. April 2016 um 22:05 Uhr
> Von: "Donald Steven" <t6sn7gt@REDACTED>
> An: "Antonios Kouzoupis" <kouzan@REDACTED>, erlang-questions@REDACTED
> Betreff: Re: [erlang-questions] How to keep adding items to a data structure
> Hi Antonios,
>
> You are kind and generous to help. I'll study this carefully. I will
> be wanting to add a list or a record, not just numbers. Is this possible?
>
> Don
>
> On 04/24/2016 03:13 PM, Antonios Kouzoupis wrote:
>> Hi Don,
>>
>> The way you iterate in Erlang and I guess in most functional programming
>> languages is by recursive call. So if you want to add/append some
>> numbers to a list, one way to go is the following:
>>
>> populate(Num) ->
>> populate(Num, []).
>>
>> populate(0, Acc) ->
>> Acc;
>> populate(Num, Acc) ->
>> populate(Num - 1, [Num | Acc]).
>>
>>
>> Now if you call populate(100), you'll get the list [1,...,100]
>>
>> BR,
>>
>>
>>
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