Distributed Life

Control Flow

As we saw in the previous post, pattern matching with different function clauses can be used in order to control the execution flow in Erlang. Erlang also provides the if, case, and receive control flow constructs that can be used in a function body. In this post I will only present the if and casestatements since receive is used for message passing and I will write a dedicated post about the subject. Both if and case are similar to the equivalent statements of other programming languages.

if statement

The format of an if statement in Erlang is the following:

if
    Boolean_Expression1 ->
	If_body1;
    Boolean_Expression2 ->
	If_body2;
    ...
    true ->
	If_body_cath_all
end

So the different clauses, except the last one, are like else if in other languages, while the last one (true ->) is like the else; it succeeds when all the previous clauses have failed.

Examples

month/1

month(M) -> 
    if
	M == 1 -> jan;
	M == 2 -> feb;
	M == 3 -> mar;
	M == 4 -> apr;
	M == 5 -> may;
	M == 6 -> jun;
	M == 7 -> jul;
	M == 8 -> aug;
	M == 9 -> sep;
	M == 10 -> oct;
	M == 11 -> nov;
	M == 12 -> dec;
	true -> {error, not_valid_month_value}
    end.

This is a different implementation of month/1 function that we saw in the previous post.

time/1

time("24:00") ->
    time("00:00");
time(Time = [H1, H2, $:, M1, M2]) when ((H1 >= $0) and (H1 =< $2)) and
				       ((H2 >= $0) and (H2 =< $9)) and
				       ((M1 >= $0) and (M1 =< $5)) and
				       ((M2 >= $0) and (M2 =< $9)) and
				       not((H1 == $2) and (H2 > $4)) and
				       not(([H1, H2] == "24") and (not([M1, M2] == "00"))) ->
    HH = list_to_integer([H1, H2]),
    if
	HH == 12 ->
	    Time ++ " PM";
	HH > 12 ->
	    integer_to_list(HH - 12) ++ [$:, M1, M2 | " PM"];
	true ->
	    Time ++ " AM"
end;
time(_) ->
    incorrect_time_format.

This function can be used to convert the time from the 24h system to the AM/PM one. A much nicer implementation can be programmed, but I used this one because it illustrates several things:

• pattern matching of strings as lists
• pattern matching of characters ($: has the value 58; the ASCII code of “:”)
• using guards
• using built-in (BIF) functions
• concatenating lists/strings

case statement

The format of a case statement in Erlang is the following:

case Expression of
    Value1 [when Guard1] ->
	Case_body1;
    Value2 [when Guard2]->
	Case_body2;
    _Other ->
	Case_body_catch_all
end

Notice that the last clause (_Other) is like the default clause in other programming languages. The Expression should always return a value (if it is a function call) that will be used to perform the pattern matching.

Examples

month/1

month(M) -> 
    case M of
	1 -> jan;
	2 -> feb;
	3 -> mar;
	4 -> apr;
	5 -> may;
	6 -> jun;
	7 -> jul;
	8 -> aug;
	9 -> sep;
	10 -> oct;
	11 -> nov;
	12 -> dec;
	_Other -> {error, not_valid_month_value}
    end.

This month/1 implementation looks “better” than the previous ones.

palindrome/1

palindrome(List) when is_list(List) ->
    case lists:reverse(List) of
	List ->
	    true;
	_ ->
	    false
    end;
palindrome(_) ->
    {error, arg_not_list}.

This function checks if a list is a palindrome. Palindromes are the lists that remain the same if reversed. For example, [a], [a,a], [a, b, a] are all palindromes.

Next

In the next post, I will introduce recursion; one of the most important characteristics of a functional language.