Choking on Syntactic Sugar

[Hakan Stenholm]

>Maurice,
>
>On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 06:09:57PM +1100, Maurice Castro wrote:
>> My question is in 3 parts:
>> 
>>       1) is this behaviour desirable 
>
>Yes,
>
>>               - note it is pure syntactic sugar for [$[, $^ | S0]

I'm a littel confused here so I would be happy if anyone would care to explain.

After reading the documentation I get the impression that ++ is simply a short 
form of lists:append/2.
I guess that this is not the case consdering that only arithmetic expressions 
that evaluate to constants are allowed in a patterns.
So what exactly is a ++:

"[^" ++ S0  is the same as  [$[, $^ | S0]

but what would happen in

fun(List1 ++ List2) -> ...

is it legal ? we only know what List1 is at run time so there shouldn't be any
way to expand it to some constant pattern as in reg4("[^" ++ S0) ?

>Yes,
>
>>       2) is this behaviour intended
>
>Yes,
>
>>       3) is it documented
>
>Yes, in the 4.4 Extensions pdf document at www.erlang.org.
>
>> 
>> Comments welcome.
>> 
>
>
>Yeah, if you feel the ++ operator is weird, take a look at the
>-- operator which is also described in the same doc, it's really
>weird. Not useless though.
>
>-- 
>Claes Wikstrom                        -- Caps lock is nowhere and
>Alteon WebSystems                     -- everything is under control          
>http://www.bluetail.com/~klacke