Erlang -- Introduction

STDLIB

User's Guide

Version 3.6

- User's Guide
- Reference Manual
- Release Notes
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### Chapters

- Introduction
  - Top of chapter
  - Scope
  - Prerequisites
- The Erlang I/O Protocol
  - Top of chapter
  - Protocol Basics
  - Output Requests
  - Input Requests
  - I/O Server Modes
  - Multiple I/O Requests
  - Optional I/O Request
  - Unimplemented Request Types
  - An Annotated and Working Example I/O Server
- Using Unicode in Erlang
  - Top of chapter
  - Unicode Implementation
  - Understanding Unicode
  - What Unicode Is
  - Areas of Unicode Support
  - Standard Unicode Representation
  - Basic Language Support
  - The Interactive Shell
  - Unicode Filenames
  - Unicode in Environment and Parameters
  - Unicode-Aware Modules
  - Unicode Data in Files
  - Summary of Options
  - Recipes

# 1 Introduction

### 1.1 Scope

The Standard Erlang Libraries application, STDLIB, is mandatory in the sense that the minimal system based on Erlang/OTP consists of STDLIB and Kernel.

STDLIB contains the following functional areas:

- Erlang shell
- Command interface
- Query interface
- Interface to standard Erlang I/O servers
- Interface to the Erlang built-in term storage BIFs
- Regular expression matching functions for strings and binaries
- Finite state machine
- Event handling
- Functions for the server of a client-server relation
- Function to control applications in a distributed manner
- Start and control of slave nodes
- Operations on finite sets and relations represented as sets
- Library for handling binary data
- Disk-based term storage
- List processing
- Maps processing

### 1.2 Prerequisites

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang programming language.