Description
There's a chance that tuple module calls ({module, ...}:function(...)) will be eventually removed, and chances are they are not going to listen to my shouting on the erlang-questions mailing list (http://t.co/iwQdXMKI)
I would like to discuss how can we potentially mitigate this issue in the future development of Elixir, once (if) tuple module calls will be removed. Without having that established, a lot of code produced for Elixir will end up having such calls and the drop will have a major impact on Elixir's users.
I don't have a good solution yet, but I'll try by starting with some brainstorming.
Idea #1.
When generating code for variable.function, always insert a check into generated absforms (if it is an atom -> call with it, if it is a tuple, shuffle the arguments around).
Obviously, there would be a concern about performance. Here are few ideas to help mitigating those:
- Disable it by default. At least until tuple module calls are dropped in Erlang.
- SImilar to common lisp and alikes, allow some optimization directives. This could be used to instruct the compiler that the calls using variable X should be the above "dispatching calls" or not. No idea what kind of syntax should that be (something as stupid as "declare(x, atom)"? :-)
2.1. Use type specifications to infer that instead. Solves the syntax & uniformity issue.
Idea #2.
Do nothing. Lets see how things will pan out
Thoughts?