new syntax - a provocation

Joe Armstrong joe@REDACTED
Wed Sep 24 17:19:44 CEST 2003


On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> wrote:
> 	  	- Proper structs
> 	
> 		<< junk the record stuff. thus has been discussed in previous
> 		   mails >>
> 	
> I never thought I'd recommend anything from IBM Prolog, but it turns out
> that "IBM PROLOG for 370" had something that LIFE had and that I've long
> wanted in Erlang.  The things I want have been known by various names in
> various languages:  "tables" in SNOBOL, "Dictionaries" in Smalltalk,
> "associative arrays" in AWK, "hashes" in Perl, "psi-terms" in LIFE,
> "feature structures" in linguistics, and who knows what elsewhere.
> 
> 
> In this message, I'm going to call them dictionaries.
> 
> A dictionary is a finite collection of (key,value) pairs such that
> all keys are atoms and no two keys are equal.  The values may be any
> Erlang terms.
> 
> Functions:

... cut ...

These are what I called "proper structs"

I posted an article about this in 2001 I can repost if you're interested ...

My structs were written

	~{K1=V1, K2=V2, ...}

or
	~Tag{K1=V1, ...}

(So that you could name an entire struct)

Update was written

	Var~{K1=NewV1, ...}

etc.

~Tag{...} works just like #Tag{....} works today
but with the difference that everything is dynamic - so whereas
#Tag{...} needs a -record(Tag, {...}) definition ~Tag{...} does not

/Joe




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