atomic

adjective

1. 1

   Of or relating to atoms; composed of atoms; monatomic.

   A stream of atomic hydrogen is emitted.

2. 2

   Employing or relating to nuclear energy or processes.

   atomic energy; atomic bombs

   Some nutjob once built a small atomic pile in his back yard.

   Before the atomic spy Allan Nunn May left Canada to go to London, a treff in London had to be arranged for him and another agent.

3. 3

   Employing or relating to nuclear energy or processes. Very strong and overpowering.

4. 4

   Infinitesimally small.

   The hairs on a dust mite are almost atomic.

5. 5

   Unable to be split or made any smaller.

   A bit is an atomic item of data.

6. 6

   Unable to be split or made any smaller. Containing a single change, as opposed to involving numerous unrelated changes.

7. 7

   Unable to be split or made any smaller. Lacking logical operators; unable to be made simpler in logical form.

8. 8

   Unable to be split or made any smaller. Such that for every element b>0 there exists an atom a such that b≥a>0.

9. 9

   Guaranteed to complete either fully or not at all while waiting in a pause, and running synchronously when called by multiple asynchronous threads.

   In order to avoid race conditions, this operation has to be atomic.

   Whenever possible, use atomic types instead of mutexes.

   It also provides an atomic compareAndSet method (which if successful has the memory effects of both reading and writing a volatile variable) and, for convenience, atomic add, increment, and decrement methods.

noun

1. 1

   An atomic operation.

Forms

plural

atomics