Because 'try' is also a keyword in Erlang. The other symbols like that without the quotes are atoms (http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/data_types.html#atom

Because 'try' is also a keyword in Erlang. The other symbols like that without the quotes are atoms (http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/data_types.html#atom http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/data_types.html#atom). So to have an atom named after a keyword we'd have to add single quotes around it.