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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I really love about Erlang, is that it unrolls loops and recursion like:

  count_to_ten(n) ->
    count_to_ten(n+1);
  count_to_ten(10) ->
    done.

which is much cleaner than how the same code is presented in 99% of functional programming languages.

That's just a combination of pattern matching and tail call optimization. That code would look exactly this same in Haskell:

    countToTen n = countToTen (n + 1)
    countToTen 10 = done

The 10 case would have to be first, or that's an infinite loop. Cases are checked in order. That said, the compiler will give you a warning about it.