[erlang-questions] Strings as Lists

[Claes Wikstrom]

Richard Carlsson wrote:
  Binaries let you do this in Erlang, but they were
> a later addition to the language, and the syntax for constructing and
> decomposing binaries came even later.
> 

Archaeological rear view mirror coming up.  The binary() datatype
was introduced by me when Per Hedeland an I ages ago ripped out all
explicit UNIX syscalls from the emulator proper.

Especially the file calls to load code. That's also when we introduced
the driver concept. A driver (C code) which from erlang looks like
a Port reads the actual file and sends it back up to erlang. All the
code loading BIFs that used to take a filename as parameter was changed
to take a binary() as param instead.

Those were the days .... 1994 ??


/klacke