[erlang-questions] My biggest beef with Erlang

[Robert Virding]

Termite has a recieve function ?? defined as (?? pred [timeout [default]])
which retrieves the first message in the mailbox which satisfies pred. This
is basically impossible to implement today in Erlang but would be possible
to add.

I would however probably oppose it as you could get into really weird
situations if pred had side effects. It is actually just like allowing user
defined functions in guards.

receive
    X when user_function(X) -> X
end

I actually defy anyone to come up with a safe, consistent and
*understandable* definition of guards which allow user defined functions. It
would also be nice if they were relatively easy to implement. Joe, remember
our ideas with pipes?

Robert

On 27/11/2007, Lev Walkin <vlm@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>
> This can be achieved using a combinator, if only there
> were a possibility to not to extract the current message,
> e.g., "retain":
>
>
> receiveFun(F) ->
>         % Discover the timeout using F
>         {Timeout, Default} = try F(timeout) of
>                 T -> T;
>                 catch
>                         _:_ -> {infinity, _}
>                 end,
>         % Receive something and validate against F.
>         receive Something ->
>                 try F(Something) of
>                         Result -> Result
>                 catch
>                         _:_ -> retain Something
>                 end
>         after Timeout -> Default end.
>
> ...
> F = fun(Pattern1) -> Actions1;
>         (Pattern2) -> Actions2 end;
>         (timeout) -> {15000, Actions};
> ...
> receiveFun(F)
>
>
> Such "retain" thingie could be reused in more interesting contexts.
> However, one drawback is that retain would be useful only for the
> nearest enclosing "receive" context.
>
>
> Joe Armstrong wrote:
> > Now you mentioned receive it occurred to me that it would be rather nice
> to
> > receive a fun in Erlang. Unfortunately receive has only one syntactic
> form
> >
> >      receive
> >          pattern1 -> action1;
> >          ...
> >      end.
> >
> > In the spirit of funs it would be very nice to say:
> >
> >      F = fun(Pattern1) -> Actions1
> >                (Pattern2) -> Actions2
> >                after Time -> Actions
> >            end,
> >      ...
> >      receive(Fun)
> >
> >       This would make writing an erlang meta interpreter much easier
> > and allow all kinds of mischief
> >
> > /Joe Armstrong
> >
> >
> >
> > On Nov 27, 2007 12:06 AM, Christian S <chsu79@REDACTED> wrote:
> >> 2007/11/26, Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED>:
> >>> or how about:
> >>> (: mod func arg1 arg2 ... )
> >>> for all cases?
> >> It seems like (? ...) and (! ...) are the chosen ways for receive and
> >> send, and (: M F A...) has a nice symmetry with that. That's a thumbs
> >> up. (However, I find that too many one-character symbols to make code
> >> be a bit "naked", I'm a fast enough typist that I dont mind spelling
> >> out full words and I think it makes code more readable in the end.)
> >>
> >> My initial feeling was that ':' would only be a reader macro, that
> >> there would be a full form for remote calls, just like how '(a b c) is
> >> shorthand for (quote (a b c)).
> >>
> >> As far as I understand, lisp started out being a theoretical model
> >> used to describe/reason about programs, until someone figured out it
> >> would be easy to make a computer evaluate them. It would probably be a
> >> sensible route to start erlang in sexprs too: write some programs,
> >> discover the needed features, then try to build an evaluator for it.
> >>
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> >>
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