[erlang-questions] How to access functions type signatures?

Dimitry Golubovsky golubovsky@REDACTED
Wed Jul 30 15:56:29 CEST 2008


Hi,

If somewhere in the documentation we see:

fread([IoDevice,] Prompt, Format) -> Result


Types:

IoDevice = io_device()
Prompt = atom() | string()
Format = string()
Result = {ok, Terms} | eof | {error, What}
 Terms = [term()]
 What = term()


is the above type information stored anywhere in a machine-consumable
form (being readable by an Erlang program is fine)?

I am asking this in connection with my Haskell-to-Erlang conversion
experiments. Being able to access such information, it would be
possible to create Haskell type signatures to call these functions
from Haskell code, something like this (manually derived):

fread :: IoDevice -> Prompt -> Format -> Result -- or rather IO Result

data IoDevice = IoDevice -- perhaps an opaque type

data Term = Term -- another opaque type

type Prompt = String
type Format = String
data Result = <some algebraic data type>

etc.

I did something like this earlier for HSFFIG (derived foreign imports
from C function prototypes), but I had to parse C headers, which I
would like to avoid this time.

Thanks.

PS this must be somewhere in th docs, but I haven't been able to dig it up.

-- 
Dimitry Golubovsky

Anywhere on the Web



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