Hacking Shindyapin

Here are the thoughts/questions I had while reading chapter 2 of the “Erlang Programming” book:

• Atoms
  • What are atoms most similar to in Ruby, the language I know best? Atoms are like symbols in Ruby, although they’re used differently.
  • Interesting fact: Although atoms can be started with a period (.) which will be ignored, they can’t be started with two or more periods (..). If you really need an atom that starts with multiple periods, just put them in single quotes (‘…………’).
• What is the difference between and and andalso (analogously, or and orelse)? I would like to see examples where the answer is different between the two uses.
• in the Erlang console, type shell:module_info(). for info about the Erlang shell module.