Language change proposal

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Hi everybody - I'd like to propose the following
> language change:
> 
> (It's *very* easy to implement)
> 
> I want all Erlang modules to be tagged with a
> "language version"
> 
> Like this ...
> 
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>     Suppose the next version of Erlang is 5.3 then:
> 
> 	1) All modules *must* start
> 
> 	-module(XXXX).
> 	-vsn("5.3").
> 
>         2) Any module *without* a version is assumed
> to be "5.2"

Since -vsn is already in use, as Lennart noted, how
about introducing

-module(XXXX, ERL_VSN).

with a release-dependent macro ?LATEST for
convenience, e.g.,

-module(lists, ?LATEST).

The advantage: if all future Erlang versions agree to
begin all modules with a -module(..., ...)
attribute, then the system can select the parser and
tokenizer to be used at that point. 

Having a floating -vsn attribute is less convenient,
or so it seems to me.

Also, I think it would be a good thing to have a 
language release, ie, a definition of what things
mean, associated with each language version. 

<http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/200310/msg00118.html>

Best,
Thomas


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