What is the "atomic event" in the TON Blockchain? (Whitepaper)

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The following content appears in this whitepaper (https://docs.ton.org/tblkch.pdf):

For instance, each outbound message created in a transaction is assigned its logical creation time; for this purpose, the creation of an outbound message is considered an atomic event.

This statement appears seven times. After checking in detail, I found that it's related to Logical Time (LT).

My question now is, what does "atomic event" mean, and how is it generated and defined? Can we say it represents the idea of a continuous and unbroken chain, meaning that the transaction is a series of effects from end to end?

  				
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	9 months ago

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					Howard
				
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Your understanding is close to the truth.

As far as I understand, "atomicity" in this context is a concept that was born way before the TON blockchain. It has probably emerged in the database field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_(database_systems)

It uses the atom metaphor as something that can't be divided (even though humanity managed to split the atom after all). So the "atomic event" is an "undivisible" event. It may consist of several parts, but they act as a whole, they can't be separated.

What that means in practice is that if an atomic event starts to happen and some part of it happens, but then something prevents the next part from happening, than the first part gets rolled back. So the atomic event either happens completely or doesn't happen at all (since everything gets rolled back and returns to the initial state). It can't "half-happen".

 						
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	8 months ago

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	8 months ago

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					Evgeniy Trifonov
				
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excellent! Thanks

— Howard 7 months ago

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