Proper or well formed Lists

[Luke Gorrie]

Francesco Cesarini <cesarini@REDACTED> writes:

> 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? 

They've caused me the odd problem too. IIRC, the runtime sometimes
generates lists in error messages like [...|more]. Some code I've used
has fizzed when it ends up getting one of these (perhaps from a
careless 'catch' or something) - particularly the java library for
decoding erlang external format (in at least as or R5 or so), I think.

Cheers,
Luke