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Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language designed for programming large industrial real-time systems. Erlang is dynamically typed and has a pattern matching syntax. Functions are defined using recursion equations. Erlang provides explicit concurrency, has asynchronous message passing and is relatively free from side effects.

Distributed Erlang programs can run transparently on cross-platform multi-vendor systems. The language has primitives for detecting run-time errors and for dynamic code replacement (i.e. changes to code can be made in a running real-time system, without stopping system).