[erlang-questions] a surprising atom

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 23 Oct 2008, at 6:45 am, Anthony Shipman wrote:

> Eshell V5.6.4  (abort with ^G)
> 1> X = ''.
> ''
> 2> is_atom(X).
> true
What is surprising about this?
  '' is an atom  with an empty name in Prolog.
'|| is an atom  with an empty name in Lisp.
#'' is a Symbol with an empty name in Smalltalk.
It would be dumbfounding if empty-name atoms _didn't_ work.