[erlang-questions] origin of handle_info/2

[Xavier Noria]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2017 at 23:11, Richard Carlsson <carlsson.richard@REDACTED>
wrote:

It's "info" in the sense of "any other messages to this process, that are
> not recognised as special OTP framework messages". When you use a function
> like gen_server:call(...), the OTP libraries wrap your message in a way
> that lets the receiving server process see that it is a part of the OTP
> framework and redirects it to the standard callbacks like handle_call() or
> handle_cast(). If you just send a message to the gen_server process with
> the ! operator, it will not have the right wrapper, and will be dispatched
> to handle_info(). Typical uses of info messages are timeouts and other
> "note to self" style messages.
>


Yes, that is the way it works, but "info" doesn't convey that meaning to
me. Does it to you?

I wondered if maybe historically it had a smaller contract where "info" was
a natural choice and with time the contract was relaxed up to accepting
anything but calls and casts.

> --
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