Tom Van Cutsem wrote:
2012/9/29 Andreas Rossberg <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> On 28 September 2012 18:28, Tom Van Cutsem <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > I agree that proxying a symbol is of little value, but I didn't say that > symbols are closer to strings than to objects. I think symbols are closer to > objects: they have an unforgeable identity. Strings don't have that, objects > do. I don't follow how generative creation is synonym to "identity", nor how identity implies being an object. Should we make everything an object just because we can? For symbols in particular I completely fail to see a good reason for doing so (now that we are able to drop the "public" name property). It will just induce extra cost for dubious semantic value -- or actually, semantic cost, as the issue of proxying them indicates. I'm not against thinking of symbols as an entirely new "class" of values. I was mostly arguing against the idea of having typeof symbol be "string". If there are good reasons for symbols not to get their own typeof type, I just think "object" would be more reasonable than "string".
When I though of this (from the user PoV), it seems to me that in fact, symbols _are_ closer to strings. I see it this way:
- closer to object === "symbol have its own identity, state and behaviour, I can add new properties and methods etc." (an array is good example of this, if you consider what it can do _beyond_ elements and length) - close to string === "symbol have its own identity and a little more than that"
IOW, it seems to me that symbols are more like "parallel" set of strings, of which every new one is different ("has different sequence of chars"), but it does not carry all the other "object-like" traits with it. More or less, only things that matters if if a symbol a === a symbol b. Which I see as string-like, not an object-like.
But, again, this is less technical and more feeling. Herby
Cheers, Tom
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