Doubt about funs

[Ulf Wiger]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Siri Hansen wrote:

>>  Taken fom the Erlang Extensions doc:
>> 
>> "We can also refer a function defined in a different module with
>> the following syntax:
>> 
>> F = {Module,FunctionName}  "
>> 
>
>The documentation also says that you can use the test function/1 in a
>guard to check if a term is a fun. This test fails for the
>{Module,FunctionName} expression.
>
>Why?

Because Erlang has no way of telling if {M, F} is any ordinary tuple
of two atoms, or a reference to a specific function.

Erlang can, on the other hand tell the difference between a fun() and
a tuple. In older implementations of funs, it couldn't do that,
and you could create a 5-tuple that could pass for a fun(), until you 
tried calling it.

/Uffe
-- 
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