[erlang-questions] some language changes

Joe Armstrong erlang@REDACTED
Mon May 21 10:10:06 CEST 2007


Now the book is done I've been thinking about some language changes.

Here's my list (no particular priority)

1. What you type in the shell and what you type in a module/escript
should be the same

2. Hashmaps (aka associative arrays)

3. Extended string syntax: idea - put an atom *before the string quote
    to say what the string means and to *change* the syntax rules that apply
    to the string content.

     X = C "......"
          C = a control atom

       X = regexp " ... "

          = html " .... "

         Then we could write regexps and LaTeX inside strings without
         all the horrible additional quotes

4. Simple string substitutions

     X = subst "aaa ${P} bbb ${Q} ccc"

      *means*    X = [<"aaa">, P, <"bbb">, Q, ...]

     This would be very useful.

None of these are large changes - but they would make Erlang a nicer language
to program in. The (regexp "....") would be extremely useful to the compiler
and allow generating efficient regexp matching code :-)

Comments?

/Joe



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