Problem With Distributed Programming Example

[warren_chambliss@REDACTED]

Hi All,

I'm trying to get up to speed with Erlang and I'm working through the "Getting Started With Erlang" document.  I'm having a problem with the first distributed programming example (tut17).  The message from ping to pong doesn't appear to be getting received (or possibly sent).

A couple questions.

- I can't get the example to work between two machines.  The pong machine has a dash ('-') character in it's hostname.  This causes the Erlang shell to complain with a badarith error in the start_ping() function.  Is there a way to include a dash in a node name?

- I can't get the example to work on a single machine using two seperate Erlang shell instances.  I've tried the hostname and "localhost" for nodenames but still no luck.

- What's the proper way in the tut17 example to specify nodes in dotted-quad IP notation (xx.xx.xx.xx)?

- Does message passing automatically work between nodes on machines with different endianness.  For example between nodes on x86 and Sparc?

Sorry if these questions are fundamental, but I'm trying to get over the basic learning hump rather quickly.

Thanks,
Warren Chambliss