The Global Engineer’s Notebook

I’ve decided to start keeping my notes online so that I don’t have to flip through notebooks to find what I need.  Some of this stuff is probably common sense and easily found in books or with online documentation, but I wanted to create a space to put my notes about the language.  The notes will focus on Erlang langauge syntax, irregularities seen from the eyes of a C/C++ programmer, and libraries that are helpful.

A common beginner mistake

Variables must start with an uppercase letter. Atoms must start with a lowercase letter. The Eclipse plug-in for Erlang development highlights the variables in orange and does not highlight the atoms.  This can be helpful when you’re just starting out with Erlang, especially if you’re coming from a language like C++/C#/Java where camel case is common for naming variables–its a tough habit to break!

Defining a constant

To define some constants in your program, in C/C++ one expects:

const double MAX_RATE = 9.78;
…
#define MAX_RETRIES 5

in Erlang, it should do the following:

-define(MAX_RATE, 9.78).
…
-define(MAX_RETRIES, 5).

On == versus =:=

A good discussion on this is available at the Trap Exit Erlang Forums.  Basically though, when comparing a floating point number and an integer == will convert the integer for to a floating point and then do the comparison.  However, =:= looks at the type, so comparing an integer and a floating point would fail since the types are not the same.  It should also be noted that =:= provides more information to the Erlang compiler and some tools like Dialyzer.

“Hot plug” functionality

One should use spawn(Module, Function, Args) to spawn a new process if upgrading the function on a production system is required.  One must *also* export the function in the module.

Useful libraries and functions