List questions

[Klacke]

 > Those of us raised on late night TV in America in the 1970s will
 > simply quote:
 > 
 >   "It's a dessert topping *and* a floor wax!"
 > 

Uhhh... we're all lost in Europe, I can imagine a 
disgusting commercial though.  

As for the:

 >  > 19> [40].
 >  > "("

behaviour, I'd say it's almost a bug, and it should be fixed.

The proper solution is to subtag integers as characters
(that is: to introduce a builtin char type) which has
the characteristics of an integer except that a new
guard test like:

f(C) when char(C) ->

returns true for chars but not for ints, and

$X + 2.

should also return a char .... and so on.


I think the OTP folks are/have been doing something like this ????


In an old implementation of Erlang where Tony Rogvall and 
I were experimenting with something we called the "bitsyntax"

(briefly described at: http://www.bluetail.com/klacke/binaries.ps)

we implemented a scheme with subtaggged integers, it never made it into
any releases though. This was done in "rage" by Tony since he
got fed up with the weird printouts from the shell.


Cheers

/klacke