[erlang-questions] Introspecting the atom table

[Michael McDaniel]

 Aha, thank you for the question and the answer.  I have a few
 places in my code to change the try/catch I've been using.  I
 do not remember where/when I started thinking new atoms would
 be created and changed my code from simple list_to_atom funs.

~M

On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 07:41:27PM -0500, Yariv Sadan wrote:
> 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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-- 
Michael McDaniel
Portland, Oregon, USA
http://autosys.us
+1 503 283 5284