Higher order receieve anybody

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Ulf Wiger <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:
	Handling system messages is the one area where I've found it
	necessary to raise the abstraction level above what 'receive'
	provides. There are workarounds -- they are called gen_server
	and gen_fsm, but they have the unfortunate side-effect of
	imposing an un-erlangish message reception paradigm on the
	unsuspecting user.
	
	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.
	
Colour me stupid, but why not have two processes?
One to do the real work, and one to handle the administrative
messages and forward stuff to the worker?
What am I missing here?