How to do table lookups? (fwd)

[Edmund Dengler]

Hi all!

On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Vance Shipley wrote:

> }  Actually, I was looking at the gen_server, and was having an issue with
> }  regards to the receives not seeming to be able to have a guard. I have a
> }  couple of programs where I do synchronization based on guard expressions
> }  to implement bounded queues. While I could rewrite to not do this, it
> }  would definitely not be as clean.
>
> I'm not sure I follow you.  You can implement guards as:
>
> handle_cast({Foo, Bar}, State) when is_integer(Bar),
> 	Bar < 10 ->

Actually, I have no real issue with the low level handling of the receives
myself (most of the apps have been fairly straight forward). I find using
the guards to block reception of messages in the receive queue quite
useful as a model. As far as I understand, the above does not block
inbound messages that would fail the test (or does it?). Ie, I would still
receive the next message in the queue, and if it is not the one I want, I
still have to put it someplace for processing later.

>
> If you want to control the number of messages in your mailbox than
> you'll just need to become an expert and implement everything you
> need.  If you're new to Erlang/OTP and you find you need to do this
> level of hackery again you should assume you are doing soomething
> wrong.
>
> }  Back to this being somebody else's program, and so do not have an option
> }  of ei.
>
> You could alwaysd write a wrapper in C using ei.

Then I would need to do all the binary parsing in C, and then convert to
appropriate Erlang components. Not sure if this would be the route I would
like.

>
> }  Nope, OpenBSD/Linux. The program does not detect that the listening
> }  program has closed the file descriptors, and so hangs on full pipes
> }  without dying.
>
> Your wrapper could solve this.

I was originally hoping for some kind of port parameter of the "kill this
program if the current Erlang process dies" kind. I could try to rig up
some form of link with a kill process. I have to see if there is a way to
extract the process id from the data returned by open_port/2.

>
> 	-Vance
>

Regards!
Ed