Guards and side effects

[James Hague]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 03:16:37 -0800, osxroolz@REDACTED  wrote:
> 
> Even more talk? Like Elvis, I want action not talk.
> 
> Looking through the erlanguage mailing archive, much friday afternoon
> talk about language change, but seldom backed by a proof-of-concept
> implementation. Should not the burden be on the person proposing the
> changes to put in some work and present evidence, rather than demanding
> that others show reason why change is not worth implementing?

The reason here is simple.  Erlang is a complex beast.  I have
submitted (and had accepted) small changes to the Erlang system.  But
changes to core language can be far from trivial.  If it can be done
as a parse transform or a straighforward compiler-level change, then
that's one thing.  But anything that requires a change to the BEAM
emulator or a new BIF or whatnot, that's a big undertaking unless the
person already understands the innards of the compiler and runtime. 
It's not like there's lots of documentation about the GC interactions
of various functions in the emulator, for example.

Note: I'm not the person who suggested this change :)

James