Guards and side effects

[osxroolz@REDACTED]

I see no compelling reason to prohibit pointer manipulation in Erlang. 
Just imagine how many really useful things you could do if
you could manipulate pointers. Communicate with other processes,
re-examine
garbage-collected data and cause behaviour in your program which you
never
imagined possible!!! This would be a real performance boaster.

There are many opportunities for the programmer to shoot him/herself
in the foot, but to hold the programmer in strict harness in this
particular corner of the language, and nowhere else, I find that
misguided.

iMan

---------

"Thomas Johnsson XA (LN/EAB)" wrote

(Subduing the hardcore functional programmer in me for a bit ... :-)

I see really no compelling reason to prohibit side effects in guards,
in fact there may well be sensible uses, for instance, communicating 
with another process
***
There are many opportunities for the programmer to shoot him/herself in
the foot,
but to hold the programmer in strict harness in this particular corner
of the
language, and nowhere else, I find that misguided.

-- Thomas
-- 
  
  osxroolz@REDACTED