Simple Dynamic Record Access

There is one thing I hate about Erlang, and it is records. It is not so much that the syntax is annoying (yet I am getting used to it), but you cannot use that syntax for dynamic field access; records are a compile-time feature.

So, without using Yariv's Smerl for something like this, I opted for a simpler solution. Records are tuples after all, and you can get record information in a list. So, you can use these two facts to create a function to get the field you specify. Not anything stellar, but for dynamic record access, it works:

find(Item, List) ->
 find_(Item, List, 1).
find_(Item, [], _) -> not_found;
find_(Item, [H|T], Count) ->
 case H of
  Item ->
   Count;
  _ ->
   find_(Item, T, Count+1)
 end.

get_rec_value(Key, Rec, RecordInfo) ->
 case find(Key, RecordInfo) of
  not_found ->
   undefined;
  Num ->
   element(Num+1, Rec)
 end.

I couldn't find something like "lists:find/2", so I implemented my own. But the main function is "get_rec_value/3". So you do this:

1> rd(person, {id, name, email}).
2> get_rec_value(name, #person{name="Brian"}, record_info(fields, person)).
"Brian"

For fun, I also did setting record value.

set_rec_value(Key, Value, Rec, RecordInfo) ->
 RecList = tuple_to_list(Rec),
 case find(Key, RecordInfo) of
  not_found ->
   Rec;
  Num ->
   List1 = lists:sublist(RecList, Num),
   List2 = lists:sublist(RecList, Num+2, length(RecList)),
   tuple_to_list(List1 ++ [Value] ++ List2)
 end.

3> set_rec_value(email, "c", #person{name="Brian", id="1", email="b"}, record_info(fields, person)).

I know this stuff looks really simple, but since I thought this was a bit of a nuisance, the fact that I cannot access records without hardcoding the values, something needed to be written.

Did I miss something though? I'd like to know. Please comment. :)