BEAM implementation questions

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Dominic Williams <erlang-list@REDACTED>
wrote:

> Thomas Lindgren wrote:
> 
> > I'd like support for this, perhaps even moreso if
> > there was some language support for declaring
> > "constant data".
> 
> I'm curious about why you'd want any specific
> support. 
> What's wrong with a constant function, e.g.:
> 
> pi() -> 3.1415.
> max_users() -> 50.

There's nothing _really_ wrong with functions
returning constant data, I just find it (a bit)
clearer to have a separate notation to say "this is a
data access, not a computation" and to indicate that I
want this data to be cached and shared somewhere. (In
some cases you instead want to hide that distinction,
of course.)

Here's one case where it turns up: when I build a
lexer (lex.erl in jungerl), I dynamically generate the
lexing table and index into it when driving the lexer.
But it would be nicer to instead have a data structure
I could emit once and for all, and then index into it
with something like:

lextable[StateName, Char]   (forgive the syntax :-)

with lextable/2 thus being a constant 2D array, not a
function. Saving the generated table as a loadable
module would also be quite useful.

The same issue turns up for yecc, incidentally, which
generates a huge swathe of code in order to implement
what amounts to a table. Cf. erl_parse.erl.

Best,
Thomas



		
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