[erlang-questions] Ideas for a new Erlang

[Sven-Olof Nystr|m]

Vlad Dumitrescu writes:
 > A general comment is that I think it would be useful with more realistic
 > examples. The counter process gives little insight into why channels would
 > be useful, and the examples for the new binding mechanism are only of the
 > form "Var = expr" instead of more general pattern matches.

True. OTOH, more substantial examples take time to write and might
sometimes obscure the ideas. In my case, it was a choice of using
brief examples or not presenting these ideas at all. I hope the
examples were sufficient to explain the  ideas.

 > Maybe we should have a place where such suggestions could be presented? Not
 > everything is ready for an EEP. Searching the list archives is slightly
 > tedious and it's difficult to keep the discussion in the right thread. Maybe
 > at trapexit?
 > 
 > ----
 > Regarding channels, there are several other paradigms that might be
 > interesting to explore. One is the "process as stream processor" one, where
 > processes work just like the UNIX toolkit programs by processing input
 > messages and sending them forward. This allows piping of processes to
 > compose functionality. With an appropriate syntax and machinery, the
 > programmer need only specify the relevant functionality desired.

I was going to explain how this could be easily implemented in Erlang
but now I see that you have already done that :-) These are of course
ancient ideas; the data flow languages are very similar. You might
find the paper by Jack Dennis (referred to in my paper) worth reading.

 > This is just a teaser for an improvement to my previous attempt at
 > http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2007-May/026467.html :-)
 > I will try to make available a presentation, with more details, examples and
 > implementation proposals. (Since it's vacation time, it may take a few
 > weeks)
 > 

Nice example snipped.




Sven-Olof