[erlang-questions] style question - best way to test multiple non-guard conditions sequentially

[Jonathan Leivent]

On 06/20/2013 10:25 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> ...
>> The problem is, once you have multiple conditions that are not guards, and that you want to examine sequentially, what simple structure can you come up with in Erlang?
>
> Well, for one thing, it might be an idea to rip the branching structure
> out of the receive.

Yeah, sure.  But, I'm forced to do that, instead of deciding to do it if 
and when it's a good way to modularize the code.  In this particular 
case, I'd like to see the full conditional all at once, compactly, 
without obfuscating plumbing, preferably in the receive statement with 
the other protocol messages.  I think it would just help me think 
clearly about this key top level of the protocol's decision tree.

Again, I haven't done a good job justifying the existence of 
unrestricted sequential conditional statements.  But, considering their 
ubiquity in virtually all other programming languages, do you really 
think Erlang's omission of such a construct is a "feature"?

Although, you might not be trying to argue that.

Anyway, I appreciate the help with finding an alternative coding scheme 
- but if it doesn't exhibit the compactness I was hoping for - that I 
can visualize in an Erlang-like pseudocode - then this isn't really 
helping here.

-- Jonathan