I am aware that you can preform simple message passing with the following:
self() ! hello.
and you can see the message by calling:
flush().
I can also create simple processes in functions with something like:
spawn(module, function, args).
However I am not clear how one can send messages to the processes with out registering the Pid.
I have seen examples showing that you can pattern match against this in the shell to get the Pid assigned to a var, so if i create a gen_server such as:
...
start_link() ->
gen_server:start_link(?MODULE, init, []).
init(Pid) ->
{ok, Pid}.
...
I can then call it with the following from the shell:
{ok, Pid} = test_sup:start_link().
{ok,<0.143.0>}
> Pid ! test.
test
So my question is, can you send messages to Pids in the form <0.0.0> with out registering them to an atom or variable in the shell? Experimenting and searching as proved fruitless...
If you happen to need to send a message to a Pid based on the textual representation of its Pid, you can do (assuming the string is "<0.42.0>"):
list_to_pid("<0.42.0>") ! Message
This is almost only useful in the shell (where you can see the output of log messages or monitor data from something like Observer); any spawned process should normally be a child of some form of parent process to which it is linked (or monitored).
As for sending a message to something you just spawned, spawn returns a Pid, so you can assign it directly to a variable (which is not the same as registering it):
Pid = spawn(M, F, A),
Pid ! Message.