[erlang-questions] If you could rename ports, what would you call them?

[Anthony Molinaro]

+1

How do we get ets and ports turned into Pids, I know it will take like 5
years to fully deprecate old usage, but why not start now?

-Anthony

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:04:18PM +0200, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Masklinn <masklinn@REDACTED> wrote:
> > On 2010-10-05, at 10:34 , Joe Armstrong wrote:
> >> Pids
> >>
> >> There shouldn't be ports in the language at all (sorry) - ports should
> >> in all circumstances
> >> behave and be indistinguishable from Pids.  open_port(...) should
> >> return a Pid and not a port.
> >>
> >> We should reduce the number of concepts in the langauge not increase
> >> them - all in the
> >> name of conceptual integrity.
> >>
> >> /Joe
> >
> > But they *are* two different concepts.
> 
> But they shouldn't have been different - sure they have a differnt way
> of being created.
> 
> There should be the notion of "creating a thing that behaves like a
> process" that is actually
> not a process, which which behaves like a process. Ets tables and
> ports should have
> been "things that behave like processes" - they should respond to messages and
> send exits when they die and so on. If they had behaved like processes
> then life would be
> easier and more regular ... If ports where pids then one would be able
> to access ports on
> remote nodes via their pids (just like remote pids in distributed erlang).
> 
> 
>  Even if at the usage level they behave the same way from the POV of
> an external process, they're not created the same way (``open_port``
> vs ``spawn`` and a bunch of control functions dumped into the
> ``erlang`` module), and you also need to distinguish them when
> *implementing* them. And I'm guessing that's where Tony is looking for
> a better name.
> >
> > If down the line ports and pids are better merged (in both external interface and implementation details) then maybe "ports" as a name/concept can disappear, but I don't think that's the case at the moment, you still need to refer to them as entities separate from pids when talking about implementing things in erlang.
> 
> The erlang view of the world is "everything is a process" - all you
> should need to know
> is how to create a process and what protocol the process obeys -
> otherwise these things should
> obey "process semantics" this should be true for ets tables and ports ...
> 
> /Joe
> 
> ________________________________________________________________
> erlang-questions (at) erlang.org mailing list.
> See http://www.erlang.org/faq.html
> To unsubscribe; mailto:erlang-questions-unsubscribe@REDACTED
> 

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anthony Molinaro                           <anthonym@REDACTED>