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<chapter>
<header>
<copyright>
<year>2003</year><year>2014</year>
<holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder>
</copyright>
<legalnotice>
The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License,
Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in
compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the
Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be
retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/.
Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS"
basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See
the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations
under the License.
</legalnotice>
<title>Modules</title>
<prepared></prepared>
<docno></docno>
<date></date>
<rev></rev>
<file>modules.xml</file>
</header>
<section>
<title>Module Syntax</title>
<p>Erlang code is divided into <em>modules</em>. A module consists
of a sequence of attributes and function declarations, each
terminated by period (.). Example:</p>
<pre>
-module(m). % module attribute
-export([fact/1]). % module attribute
fact(N) when N>0 -> % beginning of function declaration
N * fact(N-1); % |
fact(0) -> % |
1. % end of function declaration</pre>
<p>See the <seealso marker="functions">Functions</seealso> chapter
for a description of function declarations.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>Module Attributes</title>
<p>A <em>module attribute</em> defines a certain property of a
module. A module attribute consists of a tag and a value.</p>
<pre>
-Tag(Value).</pre>
<p><c>Tag</c> must be an atom, while <c>Value</c> must be a literal
term. As a convenience in user-defined attributes, if the literal term
<c>Value</c> has the syntax <c>Name/Arity</c>
(where <c>Name</c> is an atom and <c>Arity</c> a positive integer),
the term <c>Name/Arity</c> will be translated to <c>{Name,Arity}</c>.</p>
<p>Any module attribute can be specified. The attributes are stored
in the compiled code and can be retrieved by calling
<c>Module:module_info(attributes)</c> or by using
<seealso marker="stdlib:beam_lib#chunks/2">beam_lib(3)</seealso>.</p>
<p>There are several module attributes with predefined meanings,
some of which have arity two, but user-defined module
attributes must have arity one.</p>
<section>
<title>Pre-Defined Module Attributes</title>
<p>Pre-defined module attributes should be placed before any
function declaration.</p>
<taglist>
<tag><c>-module(Module).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Module declaration, defining the name of the module.
The name <c>Module</c>, an atom, should be the same as
the file name minus the extension <c>erl</c>. Otherwise
<seealso marker="code_loading#loading">code loading</seealso> will
not work as intended.</p>
<p>This attribute should be specified first and is the only
attribute which is mandatory.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>-export(Functions).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Exported functions. Specifies which of the functions
defined within the module that are visible outside
the module.</p>
<p><c>Functions</c> is a list
<c>[Name1/Arity1, ..., NameN/ArityN]</c>, where each
<c>NameI</c> is an atom and <c>ArityI</c> an integer.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>-import(Module,Functions).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Imported functions. Imported functions can be called
the same way as local functions, that is without any module
prefix.</p>
<p><c>Module</c>, an atom, specifies which module to import
functions from. <c>Functions</c> is a list similar as for
<c>export</c> above.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>-compile(Options).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Compiler options. <c>Options</c>, which is a single option
or a list of options, will be added to the option list when
compiling the module. See <c>compile(3)</c>.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>-vsn(Vsn).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Module version. <c>Vsn</c> is any literal term and can be
retrieved using <c>beam_lib:version/1</c>, see
<seealso marker="stdlib:beam_lib#version/1">beam_lib(3)</seealso>.</p>
<p>If this attribute is not specified, the version defaults
to the MD5 checksum of the module.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>-on_load(Function).</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Names a function that should be run automatically when a
module a loaded. See <seealso marker="code_loading#on_load">
code loading</seealso> for more information.</p>
</item>
</taglist>
</section>
<section>
<title>Behaviour Module Attribute</title>
<p>It is possible to specify that the module is the callback
module for a <em>behaviour</em>:</p>
<pre>
-behaviour(Behaviour).</pre>
<p>The atom <c>Behaviour</c> gives the name of the behaviour,
which can be a user defined behaviour or one of the OTP
standard behaviours <c>gen_server</c>, <c>gen_fsm</c>,
<c>gen_event</c> or <c>supervisor</c>.</p>
<p>The spelling <c>behavior</c> is also accepted.</p>
<p>The callback functions of the module can be specified either
directly by the exported function <c>behaviour_info/1</c>:</p>
<pre>
behaviour_info(callbacks) -> Callbacks.</pre>
<p>or by a <c>-callback</c> attribute for each callback
function:</p>
<pre>
-callback Name(Arguments) -> Result.</pre>
<p>where <c>Arguments</c> is a list of zero or more arguments.
The <c>-callback</c> attribute is to be preferred since the
extra type information can be used by tools to produce
documentation or find discrepancies.</p>
<p>Read more about behaviours and callback modules in
<seealso marker="doc/design_principles:spec_proc#behaviours">
OTP Design Principles</seealso>.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>Record Definitions</title>
<p>The same syntax as for module attributes is used by
for record definitions:</p>
<pre>
-record(Record,Fields).</pre>
<p>Record definitions are allowed anywhere in a module,
also among the function declarations.
Read more in <seealso marker="records">Records</seealso>.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>The Preprocessor</title>
<p>The same syntax as for module attributes is used by
the preprocessor, which supports file inclusion, macros,
and conditional compilation:</p>
<pre>
-include("SomeFile.hrl").
-define(Macro,Replacement).</pre>
<p>Read more in <seealso marker="macros">The Preprocessor</seealso>.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>Setting File and Line</title>
<p>The same syntax as for module attributes is used for
changing the pre-defined macros <c>?FILE</c> and <c>?LINE</c>:</p>
<pre>
-file(File, Line).</pre>
<p>This attribute is used by tools such as Yecc to inform the
compiler that the source program was generated by another tool
and indicates the correspondence of source files to lines of
the original user-written file from which the source program
was produced.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>Types and function specifications</title>
<p>A similar syntax as for module attributes is used for
specifying types and function specifications.
</p>
<pre>
-type my_type() :: atom() | integer().
-spec my_function(integer()) -> integer().</pre>
<p>Read more in <seealso marker="typespec">Types and Function specifications</seealso>.
</p>
<p>
The description is based on
<url href="http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0008.html">EEP8 -
Types and function specifications</url>
which will not be further updated.
</p>
</section>
</section>
<section>
<title>Comments</title>
<p>Comments may be placed anywhere in a module except within strings
and quoted atoms. The comment begins with the character "%",
continues up to, but does not include the next end-of-line, and
has no effect. Note that the terminating end-of-line has
the effect of white space.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>The module_info/0 and module_info/1 functions</title>
<p>The compiler automatically inserts the two special, exported
functions into each module: <c>Module:module_info/0</c> and
<c>Module:module_info/1</c>. These functions can be called to
retrieve information about the module.</p>
<section>
<title>module_info/0</title>
<p>The <c>module_info/0</c> function in each module returns
a list of <c>{Key,Value}</c> tuples with information about
the module. Currently, the list contain tuples with the following
<c>Key</c>s: <c>module</c>, <c>attributes</c>, <c>compile</c>,
<c>exports</c> and <c>md5</c>. The order and number of tuples
may change without prior notice.</p>
</section>
<section>
<title>module_info/1</title>
<p>The call <c>module_info(Key)</c>, where key is an atom,
returns a single piece of information about the module.</p>
<p>The following values are allowed for <c>Key</c>:</p>
<taglist>
<tag><c>module</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return an atom representing the module name.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>attributes</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return a list of <c>{AttributeName,ValueList}</c> tuples,
where <c>AttributeName</c> is the name of an attribute,
and <c>ValueList</c> is a list of values. Note: a given
attribute may occur more than once in the list with different
values if the attribute occurs more than once in the module.</p>
<p>The list of attributes will be empty if
the module has been stripped with
<seealso marker="stdlib:beam_lib#strip/1">beam_lib(3)</seealso>.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>compile</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return a list of tuples containing information about
how the module was compiled. This list will be empty if
the module has been stripped with
<seealso marker="stdlib:beam_lib#strip/1">beam_lib(3)</seealso>.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>md5</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return a binary representing the MD5 checksum of the module.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>exports</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return a list of <c>{Name,Arity}</c> tuples with
all exported functions in the module.</p>
</item>
<tag><c>functions</c></tag>
<item>
<p>Return a list of <c>{Name,Arity}</c> tuples with
all functions in the module.</p>
</item>
</taglist>
</section>
</section>
</chapter>
