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Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!
book

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

by Fred Hebert
January 2013
Beginner to intermediate
624 pages
17h 18m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

Chapter 4. Types (or Lack Thereof)

Modern functional languages are often known for their fancy type systems, which are powerful systems that let programmers obtain more safety and speed while doing less. Static type systems vary a lot—from C- and Java-like systems where annotations are provided to the compiler, to rather complex systems that depend on advanced mathematical concepts to guarantee the crash-free nature of a program. Other type systems are rather crude—not static at all, but dynamic. They give no guarantees about the safety of a piece of software, and just check everything while it runs.

This chapter introduces Erlang’s type system, the reasons behind its use, and how that affects you, as a brand-new Erlang programmer.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781457172427Errata Page