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

[Kresten Krab Thorup]

On Oct 5, 2010, at 23:17 , Robert Virding wrote:

> There should only be two types of things in Erlang, processes and 
> immutable data.

Agreed.  There is also the minor, but significant, case of handling "resource" objects; which are neither processes or immutable data ....  

	- compiled regexes
	- compiled match specs
	- ets continuations
	- binary matchstates (never exposed outside beam)
	- NIF resource objects

In implementing Erjang, I've run into issues with these several times because their semantics is not that well documented...

Ideally, all these should IMHO be exposed with the same semantics across the board; in most cases these foreign objects match the empty binary, right?  Perhaps they should also support some kind of "identical" operator? I.e. === for such resource objects could be used to see if they truly represent the same.

Kresten