Applications pass null-terminated strings to atom tables and receive string
atoms (32-bit integers) in return. String atoms have the following properties:
- The maximum number of string atoms allowed is 16K.
The values of string atoms are from 0xC000 through 0xFFFF.
- The maximum amount of data that an atom table can
store is 60K. This includes the control data that the operating system uses
to manage the atom table (32 bytes for the table plus 8 bytes for each string
atom).
- The maximum length of an atom name is 255 characters.
A zero-length string is not a valid atom name.
- Case is significant when searching for an atom name
in an atom table, and the entire string must match. No substring matching
is performed.
- A usage count is associated with each atom name. The
count is incremented each time the atom name is added to the table and decremented
each time the atom name is deleted from the table. This allows different
users of the same string atom to avoid destroying each other's atom names.
When the usage count for an atom name equals zero, the system removes the
atom and atom name from the table.
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