[erlang-questions] Introspecting the atom table

[Yariv Sadan]

Do repeated calls to list_to_atom(Str) with the same Str value
actually create new atoms, or does list_to_atom() check if the atom
already exists? (I thought it was the latter)

Yariv

>  My understanding is that "an atom is forever".  In long running
>  code I don't want to keep creating new atoms if I already have
>  one.  The above I use where I have sporadic communication between
>  remote servers that could come online or offline.
>
>  This was one example where I might not want to keep creating new
>  atoms so use the try/catch idiom.
>
> ~M
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