Erlang
goodmath | January 7, 2008 I decided to do a little bit of something useful with Erlang, both to have some code to show, and to get some sense of what it's like writing something beyond a completely trivial example. Because the capabilities of Erlang shine when you get into low-level bit oriented things, I thought that writing a bit of data compression code would be make for a good example. I'm going to present it in two parts: first a simple but stupid version of the algorithm; and then the encoding part, which into bit twiddling, and potentially gets more interesting.
I'm going to use a simple version of Lempel-Ziv…
goodmath | December 16, 2007 One of the things I discovered since writing part one of my Erlang introduction is that Erlang has grown a lot over the last few years. For example, the idiom of tagged tuple as a way of creating a record-like structure has been coded into the language. There is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch. They aren't really added to the language. Instead, there's a pre-processor in Erlang, and records
are defined by translation in the pre-processor. This to me typifies one of the less attractive
attributes of Erlang: much of Erlang has a very ad-hoc flavor to it. There are important high-level…
goodmath | November 25, 2007Several commenters pointed out that I made several mistakes in my description of Erlang. It turns out that the main reference source I used for this post, an excerpt from a textbook on Erlang available on the Erlang website, is quite out of date. I didn't realize this; I assumed that if they pointed towards that as a tutorial, that it would represent the current state of the language. My bad. As a result, several things that I said about Erlang - including some negative comments, were inaccurate. I've updated the article, and the changes are marked with comments.
As long-time readers will…