Women in Technology

Article:		An Introduction to Erlang
Subject:		Recursion? Goto?
Date:		2007-12-20 19:37:17
From:		rickhg12hs
A complete newbie question ... Regarding: loop(MyName) -> receive { accept, SenderName, Message } -> io:format("~n~s receives from ~s: ~s ~n", [MyName, SenderName, Message]), loop(MyName); { say, Message } -> io:format("~n~s says ~s ~n",[MyName, Message]), room ! { self(), broadcast, MyName, Message }, loop(MyName) end. Is "loop(MyName)" a recursive call? ... a goto? What happens under the hood? E.g., is a completely new call stack generated for each "loop(MyName)"? Thanks for the intro article. It's got me interested in Erlang.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Recursion? Goto?
  2007-12-21 03:46:33  Gregory Brown | [View]
  
  
  Hi. The call to loop() is a simply a recursive call. Functional languages are optimized to handle recursion efficiently, and Erlang is no exception.
  
  I'm mostly an Erlang newbie, so I won't venture into guessing what the optimizations are, but I will say that virtually all Erlang code you write will include recursion in some form or another.
  
  I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I need to dig up and dust off some code that I wrote that does simplified neural networking in Erlang. If I ever do that, you'll find it under an Erlang tag at http://metametta.blogspot.com
  
  -greg