[erlang-questions] atoms in iodata() / iolist()

[Fred Hebert]

On 05/25, Richard Carlsson wrote:
>Yes, I think it was a mistake not to include atoms in iolists to begin with
>(funnily, filenames can be deep and include atoms, but iolists can't). It
>might be pretty hard to change though, since there is so much existing code
>that might crash if it stumbled over an atom in a list that was produced by
>more modern code.
>
>Several functions in the standard libraries become needlessly expensive
>because of this need to expand atoms before they can be included in
>iolists, even when the result is just going to be sent directly to a file
>or port.
>
I would have expected it more reasonable to remove atoms from these than 
to add them everywhere.