Question

I’m basically following the tutorial on this site Learn you some Erlang:Designing a concurrent application and I tried to run the code below with the following commands and got an error on line 48. I did turn off my firewall just in case that was the problem but no luck. I’m on windows xp SP3.

9> c(event).

{ok,event}

10> f().

ok

11> event:start(“Event”,0).

=ERROR REPORT==== 9-Feb-2013::15:05:07 ===
Error in process <0.61.0> with exit value: {function_clause,[{event,time_to_go,[0],[{file,”event.erl”},{line,48}]},{event,init,3,[{file,”event.erl”},{line,31}]}]}

<0.61.0>

12>

-module(event).
-export([start/2, start_link/2, cancel/1]).
-export([init/3, loop/1]).
-record(state, {server,
                name="",
                to_go=0}).

%%% Public interface
start(EventName, DateTime) ->
    spawn(?MODULE, init, [self(), EventName, DateTime]).

start_link(EventName, DateTime) ->
    spawn_link(?MODULE, init, [self(), EventName, DateTime]).

cancel(Pid) ->
    %% Monitor in case the process is already dead
    Ref = erlang:monitor(process, Pid),
    Pid ! {self(), Ref, cancel},
    receive
        {Ref, ok} ->
            erlang:demonitor(Ref, [flush]),
            ok;
        {'DOWN', Ref, process, Pid, _Reason} ->
            ok
    end.

%%% Event's innards
init(Server, EventName, DateTime) ->
    loop(#state{server=Server,
                name=EventName,
                to_go=time_to_go(DateTime)}).

%% Loop uses a list for times in order to go around the ~49 days limit
%% on timeouts.
loop(S = #state{server=Server, to_go=[T|Next]}) ->
    receive
        {Server, Ref, cancel} ->
            Server ! {Ref, ok}
    after T*1000 ->
        if Next =:= [] ->
            Server ! {done, S#state.name};
           Next =/= [] ->
            loop(S#state{to_go=Next})
        end
    end.

%%% private functions
time_to_go(TimeOut={{_,_,_}, {_,_,_}}) ->
    Now = calendar:local_time(),
    ToGo = calendar:datetime_to_gregorian_seconds(TimeOut) -
           calendar:datetime_to_gregorian_seconds(Now),
    Secs = if ToGo > 0  -> ToGo;
              ToGo =< 0 -> 0
           end,
    normalize(Secs).

%% Because Erlang is limited to about 49 days (49*24*60*60*1000) in
%% milliseconds, the following function is used
normalize(N) ->
    Limit = 49*24*60*60,
    [N rem Limit | lists:duplicate(N div Limit, Limit)].

Answer 1

It’s running purely locally on your machine so the firewall will not affect it.

The problem is the second argument you gave when you started it event:start("Event",0).

The error reason:

{function_clause,[{event,time_to_go,[0],[{file,"event.erl"},{line,48}]},{event,init,3,[{file,"event.erl"},{line,31}]}]}

says that it is a function_clause error which means that there was no clause in the function definition which matched the arguments. It also tells you that it was the function event:time_to_go/1 on line 48 which failed and that it was called with the argument 0.

It you look at the function time_to_go/ you will see that it expects its argument to be a tuple of 2 elements where each element is a tuple of 3 elements:

time_to_go(TimeOut={{_,_,_}, {_,_,_}}) ->

The structure of this argument is {{Year,Month,Day},{Hour,Minute,Second}}. If you follow this argument backwards you that time_to_go/ is called from init/3 where the argument to time_to_go/1, DateTime, is the 3rd argument to init/3. Almost there now. Now init/3 is the function which the process spawned in start/2 (and start_link/2) and the 3rd argument toinit/3is the second argument tostart/2`.

So when you call event:start("Event",0). it is the 0 here which is passed into the call time_to_go/1 function in the new peocess. And the format is wrong. You should be calling it with something like event:start("Event", {{2013,3,24},{17,53,62}}).