[erlang-questions] Checking Types at Runtime

[Eric Merritt]

Maybe its worth parsing at initialization and storing somewhere then,
better to define the types once in the spec and reuse them then force
the dev to define them multiple times and keep them in sync. Whether
you can do that or not will depend very much on the system you are
writing of course.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Tristan Sloughter
<tristan.sloughter@REDACTED> wrote:
> OK, that is what I thought. But declaring specs and relying on dialyzer for
> problems doesn't help when I want to match on a type. But I guess I'll have
> to either bundle the "type" with the value of the record field. Or have some
> module that accepts a record field atom and returns its "type"...
> Tristan
>
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 7:31 PM, Eric Merritt <ericbmerritt@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>>
>> Thats not possible at the moment. Dialyzer will do a good job at
>> compile time warning you that something is wrong. I think thats about
>> your best bet.
>>
>> Now, as I understand it this type information *is* retained in the
>> compiled beam file. So you could possibly write something that will
>> check the types for you, but I don't think it would be very
>> performant.
>>
>> I think the right answer, at least with out more details, is to do a
>> good job declaring specs and using them, while relying on dialyzer to
>> tell you when there are problems.
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Tristan Sloughter
>> <tristan.sloughter@REDACTED> wrote:
>> > I'm pretty sure this isn't possible but I wanted to be sure before
>> > working
>> > around the lack of it.
>> > if I have a type and record like:
>> > -type password() :: binary().
>> > -record(user, {username :: binary(),
>> >                     password  :: password()}.
>> > At run time there is no way to tell a field is suppose to be of some
>> > type
>> > during runtime, right?
>> > Basically I'd like to be able to have generic or generated create
>> > functions
>> > for records that may have to modify arguments (like a password has to be
>> > encrypted from the string provided) when creating the record. So the
>> > create
>> > function would pass each field, its value and its type to a transform
>> > function that matches on type and returns the appropriately modified
>> > value.
>> > Any ideas on how to do this with type definitions or do I need to use
>> > tuples
>> > and an atom like {Type, Value} for the value of every field to achieve
>> > this?
>> > Thanks,
>> > Tristan
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>> >
>
>