[erlang-questions] Re: Breaking out of a foldl
Robert Virding
rvirding@REDACTED
Tue Jun 2 10:40:21 CEST 2009
2009/6/2 mats cronqvist <masse@REDACTED>
>
> > Yeah, but it's syntax is somewhat misleading. People with
> > Java/C++/Eiffel/etc. background would expect that exceptions should be
> > used in exceptional situation, not instead of a return statement
> > (which Erlang lacks).
>
> Erlang might lack the keyword 'return', but it does have a non-local
> return construct; 'throw'. Whether or not C++ have problems with
> that seems quite off-topic here.
True, true. I just want to confirm here that it is exactly as Richard said
in an earlier post that catch/throw came directly from the lisp world. We
had no problems with it. :-) The only complaint I have with catch is that it
also catches errors, but it *was* a predecessor to try so it had to catch
everything.
> Perhaps we can agree that keeping the core libraries small, consistent
> and intuitive is a very good thing (*).
>
> ...
>
> (*) Unfortunately, the current libs fails on all of these; there's way
> too much cruft (like lists:foldr), they're inconsistent (like string
> sub_string/substr) and counter-intuitive ( try e.g. lists:seq(2,1)).
Foldr is pretty natural, I think anyway. String is a mess of course, but
there were at one time 2 string libraries and this was the easy way out (but
the wrong way in the long run). There *is*, however, as you say a lot of
cruft in the libraries, but knowing the difficulties with getting rid of
something it is most likely to stay that way.
Robert
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