Calling Erlang Directly

You can declare an Erlang function with @external and call it straight away, without writing a module. This is handy for poking at the BEAM from the prompt.

Keep the whole declaration on one line. GSH evaluates each line as soon as it's complete on its own, and an @external(...) line by itself is, so splitting it fails:

gleam

gsh(8)> @external(erlang, "erlang", "system_time")
error: Syntax error near At

On one line, it works:

gleam

gsh(2)> @external(erlang, "erlang", "system_time") fn system_time() -> Int
gsh(3)> system_time() > 0
True : Bool