Comment by masklinn
4 hours ago
> 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.