Higher order receieve anybody

[Tony Rogvall]

On Tuesday, Feb 24, 2004, at 09:48 Europe/Stockholm, Ulf Wiger wrote:
>
> I would like to see the possibility to divide messages into
> two separate categories: administrative (such as suspend,
> resume, inspect, upgrade) and operative (whatever the program
> is _really_ supposed to do. And I would like to be able to keep
> them separated without messing up the programming semantics.

One idea (tested and implemented) is to use a primitive 
erlang:signal(Pid,Sig, Info) to send
a primitive form of messages.  For example message passing could be 
implemented as
erlang:signal(Pid, 'MESSAGE', Message). In Multi Pro Erlang we did the 
signal dispatcher in C code.
In retrospect we should have implemented a signal dispatcher / 
signal_handler in Erlang. This way
all signals (including messages) would be processed by Erlang code. 
Then one could implement
the link semantics and message reception etc in Erlang code!
The signal handler should be called in the context of the receiving 
process with some kind of
interrupt semantics (when it comes to receive).


-module(signal_handler).
-export([handle_signal/3]).

handle_signal(From, 'MESSAGE', Message) ->
	erlang:queue_message(Message);
handle_signal(From, 'LINK', _) ->
          erlang:add_link(From);
...
	

/Tony



> /Uffe
> -- 
> Ulf Wiger, Senior System Architect
> EAB/UPD/S
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