[erlang-questions] mutable state

[ok@REDACTED]

On second thought, the obvious and natural way to model
objects in Erlang is as processes.

An object executes

loop(Var1, Var2, ..., Varn) ->
    receive
        {selector,Arg...} ->
            do some stuff,
            loop(Var1', Var2', ..., Varn')
      ; ...
    end.

This is pretty much what Hewitt's actors did, and pretty much
what an early version of Smalltalk did.

You get objects with identity and state; you get synchronous
and asynchronous message sends; you get *distributed* objects.
The one thing you do not get is classes, although delegation is
easy to arrange.

However, inheritance is simply a way of *writing* OO programs;
there doesn't have to be anything analogous to inheritance
happening at run time.

(Come to think of it, you *could* have classes and inheritance.)