I believe two identical symbols are the same object, which implies that Dict lookup shouldn't require hashing. I haven't benchmarked this, though.
Since this is a huge change (although one that I am in favor of) that presumably affects a lot of existing code, any objection if I add some deprecation warnings? Simon On Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:46:19 PM UTC-5, Cristóvão Duarte Sousa wrote: > > BTW, is there some documentation about the choice of symbols vs strings > for this kind of stuff (dictionary keys, optional function args, etc.)? Are > symbols more efficient for this? > > > > On Wednesday, January 29, 2014 5:11:20 PM UTC, John Myles White wrote: >> >> As we continue trying to prune DataFrames down to the essentials that we >> can reasonably commit to maintaining for the long-term future, we've >> decided to start using only symbols for the names of columns and remove all >> uses of strings. >> >> This change will go live on master today, so please don't pull from >> master until you're ready to update your code. >> >> -- John >> >>
