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The filing system

In the last section, we had all our files in a “current working directory”. We called lfec in the same directory that we created montyhall.lfe in, and it made montyhall.beam in the same directory. We called lfe in the same directory to run the compiled program.

While this works for a small example, it will be convenient in the long run to arrange our files in a standard directory structure. First, we will define the environment variable ERL_LIBS to point to an umbrella directory that will contain, at whatever depth, all our LFE files. E.g.,

export ERL_LIBS=~/erllib

Now, under $ERL_LIBS, it does not matter at what depth, create a directory prob to contain all our code pertaining to this text. In prob create the subdirectories src and ebin. Put the file montyhall.lfe in prob/src. cd to prob/src, and type

lfec -o ../ebin montyhall

This will create montyhall.beam in prob/ebin.

You may now call lfe anywhere, and any compiled file that is in an ebin anywhere under $ERL_LIBS will be directly visible.

% lfe
Erlang ...
LFE Shell ...
> (: montyhall run)
> 0.6713

I find it useful to have my text editor vim load the following automatically:

set acd
au bufwritepost *.lfe !lfec -o ../ebin %

This will take care to compile any .lfe file you edit to the appropriate place. You may be able to do something similar with Emacs.

Multiple modules

In montyhall.lfe, the part that runs the game many times can be extracted out into a different module, say montecarlo.lfe, because we expect to use it unchanged for many different problems, not just the Monty Hall game.

(defmodule montecarlo
  (export (run 1) (run 2)))
(defun run (experiment num-trials)
  (fletrec ((loop (i acc)
                  (if (=< i num-trials)
                    (loop (+ i 1) (+ acc (funcall experiment)))
                    (/ acc num-trials))))
    (loop 1 0)))
(defun run (experiment)
  (run experiment
       ;since num-trials not specified, assume

Note again, the module name matches the basename of the file.

We have defined the function run twice! In LFE, unlike Lisp or Scheme, we can provide a function definition for the same name multiple times, as long as they differ in arity (the number of arguments they accept). When the function is called, it does the right thing based on the number of arguments supplied.

The 2-ary run takes two arguments, the experiment to be run, and num-trials, the number of times it needs to be run. The unary run lacks the num-trials parameter, so it assumes it to be 10000 before handing the job over to 2-ary run.

The export indicates we make available both the unary and the 2-ary procedures run.

Note also that within the 2-ary run, the argument experiment when called, requires a funcall. This is because LFE is a Lisp-2, and any variable containing a function must be funcalled, otherwise the symbol-function associated with the variable name would be called.

We also need corresponding changes in montyhall.lfe. We replace the existing run definition with the following wrapper to the run in montecarlo.lfe:

(defun run ()
  (: montecarlo run (fun game 0)))

(fun game 0) is how you refer, as a value, to the 0-ary procedure game. You may also use #’game/0.

If you further wanted to specify the module that this procedure hails from, use (fun montyhall game 0) or #’montyhall:game/0.

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