Arity of funs

Bjorn Gustavsson bjorn@REDACTED
Wed Mar 15 12:13:05 CET 2000


OK, it is of course possible to find out the arity by applying the fun
with different number of arguments and examine the EXIT code.
There will be a badarity exception if the arity was wrong.

This is still not a general solution, since the call may succeed and it may
have unexpected side effects. This might or might not be a problem
depending on what you are trying to achieve in the first place.

What I've learned is that I should be more careful with my words.
I should have written that there is no general, side-effect free way
to obtain the arity of a fun.

/Bjorn

matthias@REDACTED writes:

> 
> 
>  > There is no way to find out the arity of a fun.
> 
> I've put a .beam file up at 
> 
>      http://www.ericsson.se/cslab/~mml/besserwisser.beam
> 
> Here's what it does:
> 
> 4> besserwisser:arity(fun(_) -> a end).
> 1
> 5> besserwisser:arity(fun() -> a end). 
> 0
> 6> besserwisser:arity(fun(p,q,r) -> a end).
> 3
> 
> How it works is a secret. Looking in the local filesystem is cheating,
> Björn.
> 
> Matthias
> 

-- 
Björn Gustavsson            Ericsson Utvecklings AB
bjorn@REDACTED      ÄT2/UAB/F/P
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