Isn’t this to_charlist/1? Or is that working on graphemes?
NobbZ
fireproofsocks
I don’t know. I’m kinda weirded out that if I want to have a variable that stores a list of integers, it seems that it will be automagically converted to a readable string if I happen to be storing integers that correspond to code points:
iex> my_list = [-1, 99, 97, 116]
[-1, 99, 97, 116]
iex> my_list = [99, 97, 116]
'cat' # <-- wuuuut?!?
I mean… what if I wanted to store the scores of basketball games of something.
0
NobbZ
As [99] and 'c' are just different representations of the same value, who cares? Similar to how <<99>> and "c" are just the same…
1
ericmj
Elixir Core Team
A list of integers can be presented as text surrounded with single quotes if the integers are valid code points <128. But that is only how the list is presented, it is still really a list of integers. This is similar to how binaries that are sequences of bytes can be represented as strings if the binary is valid and printable UTF-8.
2
fireproofsocks
who cares?
Many people, myself included, find this conflation of representations and the dismissal of distinctions very, very confusing. There is a reason we don’t code in assembly, for example, or that we don’t plötzlich mitten im Satz deutsch sprechen.
0
fireproofsocks
Yeah, that native Erlang functionality smells to me. I would much prefer to opt-in to that kind of surprising behavior. It’s bad dev-UX IMO.
1
NobbZ
But its a representation only visible to you as developer during debugging your stuff. It is a product of the Inspect protocol, which’ output is not meant to be end-user facing.
When you prepare output for the end-user you should prepare your output by other means.
Until then it does not make any difference if you see 'cat' or ~c"cat" or [99, 97, 116] in iex, as all 3 are just the same values.
iex(1)> 'cat' = ~c"cat" = [99, 97, 116]
'cat'
1
ericmj
Elixir Core Team
It’s wrong in some cases but the reverse would be just as wrong in other cases:
iex> 'cat'
[99, 97, 116]
4
hauleth
A little bit yes, but now imagine situation when GenServer crashes and instead of text you get hell lot of lists with meaningless numbers in them.
5
fireproofsocks
Thank you all for your input – this has been very educational. I have submitted a PR to the https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/binaries-strings-and-char-lists.html page that I hope will better explain the concepts at play here.
6