Dynamically Generating Atoms

Atoms are constants where their name is their own value.

The use of atoms like :ok and :error show up all over the place in Elixir. These are atoms that tend to be statically defined. Atoms can also be dynamically defined using string interpolation.

For example, I can generate a handful of atoms by mapping over a range of integers.

> Enum.map(1..5, &(:"some_atom_#{&1}"))
[:some_atom_1, :some_atom_2, :some_atom_3, :some_atom_4, :some_atom_5]

Note: atoms are not garbage collected. If you dynamically generate atoms in excess, you may run your VM out of heap space.