Erlang Dialyzer: only accept certain integers?

Question

Say I have a function,foo/1, whose spec is -spec foo(atom()) -> #r{}., where #r{} is a record defined as -record(r, {a :: 1..789})., however, I have foo(a) -> 800. in my code, when I run dialyzer against it, it didn't warn me about this, (800 is not a "valid" return value for function foo/1), can I make dialyzer warn me about this?

Edit

Learn You Some Erlang says:

Dialyzer reserves the right to expand this range into a bigger one.

But I couldn't find how to disable this.

Answer 1

As of Erlang 18, the handling of integer ranges is done by erl_types:t_from_range/2. As you can see, there are a lot of generalizations happening to get a "safe" overapproximation of a range.

If you tried to ?USE_UNSAFE_RANGES (see the code) it is likely that your particular error would be caught, but at a terrible cost: native compilation and dialyzing of recursive integer functions would not ever finish!

The reason is that the type analysis for recursive functions uses a simple fixpoint approach, where the initial types accept the base cases and are repeatedly expanded using the recursive cases to include more values. At some point overapproximations must happen if the process is to terminate. Here is a concrete example:

fact(1) -> 1;
fact(N) -> N * fact(N - 1).

Initially fact/1 is assumed to have type fun(none()) -> none(). Using that to analyse the code, the second clause is 'failing' and only the first one is ok. Therefore after the first iteration the new type is fun(1) -> 1. Using the new type the second clause can succeed, expanding the type to fun(1|2) -> 1|2. Then fun(1|2|3) -> 1|2|6 this continues until the ?SET_LIMIT is reached in which case t_from_range stops using the individual values and type becomes fun(1..255) -> pos_integer(). The next iteration expands 1..255 to pos_integer() and then fun(pos_integer()) -> pos_integer() is a fixpoint!

Incorrect answer follows (explains the first comment below):

You should get a warning for this code if you use the -Woverspecs option. This option is not enabled by default, since Dialyzer operates under the assumption that it is 'ok' to over-approximate the return values of a function. In your particular case, however, you actually want any extra values to produce warnings.