ex 8.11 in Programming Erlang

[Xingzhi Pan]

Hi,

I'm working through Joe's Programming Erlang and saw these nice exercises.
I've read previous solution at
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2007-September/029405.html but
I have a question regarding the exercise itself.

For your convenience the problem is:

Write a function start(AnAtom, Fun) to register AnAtom as spawn(Fun). Make
sure your program works correctly in the case when two parallel processes
simultaneously evaluate start/2. In this case, you must guarantee that one
of these processes succeeds and the other fails.

So when the author wrote "simultaneously evaluates start/2", he also means
"with the same AnAtom", right? 'Cause if not, it would make all those
discussions baseless...

Am I splitting hair?

Thanks in advance.

Pan, Xingzhi