Bang Bang

[Joe Armstrong]

Oh dear, sorry it's not *pure* erlang :-)

If the great maintainers add the following line to erl_parse.yrl

-----
expr_100 -> expr_150 '!' '!' expr_100: {call, line('$1'),
                                        {remote, line('$1'),
                                                {atom, line('$1'),sysd},
                                                {atom, line('$1'),rpc}},
                                        ['$1', '$4']}.
----- 

then it would be standard Erlang :-)

Users would be free to define their own sysd:rpc

((possibly even better is to exapand this into ?MODULE:rpc/2))

The change is purely *local* - if you "make" everything a new versions of
erl_parse.erl{.beam} are put into the /widgets subdirectory.

    Pid !! X is just expanded into

	sysd:rpc(Pid, X).

    This make the code (IMHO) very pretty

    The code to swap the values in two entries, is thus ...

    Entry1 = Win !! mkEntry(....)
    Entry2 = Win !! mkEntry(...)
    Button = Win !! mkButton(....)
    ...
    
    Swap = fun(_) ->
	      Str1 = Entry1 !! read,
	      Str2 = Entry2 !! read,
	      Entry1 ! {set, Str1},
	      Entry2 ! {set, Str2}
	   end,

    Button ! {onClick, Swap}

    ...

    To my mind this code is very clear and beautiful.

    We could even see at a glance that

	Entry !! read

    is a possible error (ie it should be)

	Var = Entry !! read

    ie why do an rpc and NOT store the value - if you *wanted* to
read the value but not get a return value you could write

	Entry ! read

     Instead ....

    Converting this to  rpc(Entry, read) etc is a lot uglier.

<<aside>>
 
It's a pity I had to change the parser to do this.

I can't do this with -parse_transform(...) because parse transform
only works with correctly parsed forms and !! is not a correct form.

What one needs is 

	-token_transform(Mod).

Which transforms the input token stream prior to parsing.

/Joe

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, mats cronqvist wrote:

>    thought i try ex11, but then i saw this;
> "!! is an infix RPC operator. This needs a ONE LINE change to 
> erl_parse.yrl which makes a new version of erl_parse.erl"
>    so only people that willing/able to rebuild erl_parse can try ex11. i 
> for one am not (willing, that is).
>    but maybe a sed script or something can convert the code to erlang?
> 
>    mats
>