Comment by phoronixrly
5 hours ago
How so? Quite literally symbols are used as an immutable string with a shorter syntax. So much so that I've been finding their literal constraints limiting lately.
5 hours ago
How so? Quite literally symbols are used as an immutable string with a shorter syntax. So much so that I've been finding their literal constraints limiting lately.
Almost the entire value of symbols separate from strings is at the level of programmer communication rather than PL semantics.
It tells a reader of the code that this term is arbitrary but significant, probably represents an enmeshment with another part of the code, and will not be displayed to any user. When seeing a new term in code that is a lot of the things you're going to need to figure out about it anyway. It's a very valuable & practical signal.
If you need to mutate or concat or interpolate or capitalize or any other string operation it, it probably shouldn't be a symbol anymore, or shouldn't have been to start with.
> Almost the entire value of symbols separate from strings is at the level of programmer communication rather than PL semantics.
That's the opposite of reality. Symbols are necessitated by PL semantics, which is why languages which don't have those problematic string semantics tend to not bother with symbols.
> It tells a reader of the code that this term is arbitrary but significant
That you can do that with symbols is not why they exist (you can need to associate additional semantics with pretty much any first or third-party type after all, that's why the newtype pattern is so popular in modern statically typed languages).
And it's not like you need formal symbols to do it in the first place. For instance like an other nearby commenter in Python I do that by using single and double-quoted strings, having taken up that habit from Erlang (where symbols are single quoted and strings are double quoted).
> And it's not like you need formal symbols to do it in the first place.
I mean we don't need any of this shit. Go take a long bath and then write some assembly I don't care. Symbols are a useful tool in some languages, for the reasons I described. That you're creating ad hoc quoting conventions to recover part of the functionality of this feature in languages that don't have it is a pretty strong signal I'm correct! Opposite of reality my ass lol.