Proper or well formed Lists

[Ulf Wiger]

Well, one possible use of non-well-formed lists was explored a while
ago on erlang-questions: lazy lists:

http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/200010/msg00100.html

It was decided not to open that Pandora's Box.

Another use seems to be [byte() | binary()], which is accepted by 
the list_to_binary/1 BIF. It doesn't seem indispensable.

I agree that there would be an advantage to have clearer errors in the
cases where lists are supposed to be well-formed, but aren't.

/Uffe

On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Francesco Cesarini wrote:

>A well formed list follows the definition List = [Term|List] or [].
>Why where non proper (or well formed) lists (List = [Term|Term] ex:
>[hello|world]) allowed in the language in the first place?
>
>I am having a hard time seeing the need or intent with non well
>formed lists, other than a simplifying run-time evaluations and
>possibly the parsing. Wouldn't it have been better to have
>expressions not evaluating to a well formed list result in a run
>time error?
>
>Regards,
>Francesco
>

-- 
Ulf Wiger                                    tfn: +46  8 719 81 95
Senior System Architect                      mob: +46 70 519 81 95
Strategic Product & System Management    ATM Multiservice Networks
Data Backbone & Optical Services Division      Ericsson Telecom AB