[erlang-questions] Why is there an atom table?

[Pierre Fenoll]

Hi,

So, atoms are stored in a shared table, using locks to read & write, and
never garbage-collected.
Well we know the issues that emerge from this.

What I can't find on the Web is the purpose of this table.
Why does Erlang needs to assign a unique hash to a <255-characters string
and put it in memory?

I thought atoms were just like enums, thus the only actions needed on them
were ==, =:= and the various conversions to string or binary.
An atom (approximately) corresponds to this regexp:
[a-z'][a-zA-Z0-9_']{,254}.
Its syntactic representation **already** supports the actions I cited.

Why not get rid of the atom table and and just use strncmp(3)?

Cheers,
Pierre
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