We mostly did this to prepare for the time when Julia will let us overload the dot-operator to access columns like df.col1. Symbols also encourage people to use valid Julia identifiers as column names, which makes it easier to work with column names in some contexts.
— John On Jan 29, 2014, at 5:46 PM, Cristóvão Duarte Sousa <[email protected]> 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 >
