[erlang-questions] a surprising atom

[Ulf Wiger]

2008/10/22 Matthew Dempsky <matthew@REDACTED>:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Ulf Wiger <ulf@REDACTED> wrote:
>> I think that has to do with your tty settings. For me it's:
>
> I think the emphasis was on atoms being arbitrary strings.

They can be. If they contain non-alphanumeric characters, they
should be quoted, and the first one ('\000') was. The other one
wasn't, since, apparently, Erlang considers it a character.

>
>> 11> list_to_atom([255]).
>> ÿ
>
> Your terminal is broken.  It's using ISO 8859-1 when it should be
> using UTF-8.  ;-)

Yeah, well it's coLinux with Finnish language settings (since the
Swedish one didn't work at all), so it's broken alright. (:

Still, ÿ is part of the Latin-1 character set, which is what
Erlang uses.

BR,
Ulf W