[erlang-questions] I need to call unexported functions from the erlang shell

[Luke Gorrie]

Howdy,

Just a friendly reminder -

I need to be able to call unexported functions from the Erlang shell.
I need to do this in lots of contexts - simple experimenting,
late-night troubleshooting on live networks, etc. This is not a
personal quirk, it's the nature of the work that we do at Synapse.

I would very much like a better way to accomplish this than adding
-compile(export_all) to all the modules, which is what we do today.
I hope one day Erlang adds a better option.

I have previously posted a parse_transform that creates a "back door"
for calling unexported functions and a patch to R9's erl_eval to use
it for the shell. This would be perfectly adequate except that I don't
like to use parse_transforms and interpreter hacks in production
systems and so we don't deploy this code on customer installations.

I know that there are implications for the compiler etc but these are
implementation details separate from the real-life requirement.

Cheers,
-Luke