We talked at some point about making :"<R>" syntax for symbol("<R>") and
requiring something like :("<R>") to express the fairly useless operation
of quoting the string "<R>" (this is useless because the result is just the
string "<R>"). Barring some problem with this that I'm not thinking of, I'd
be in favor of such a change.
On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 3:14 AM, Tomas Lycken <tomas.lyc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to hijack the thread, but since I stumbled over this problem myself
> (in the same context) and didn't know about the `symbol("A")` syntax, this
> seems like an appropriate place to ask:
>
> In the dataframe I was working with, I had one column named "R", and
> another which I wanted to name "<R>". Using :R was no problem, but it's not
> possible to refer to :<R> at all. (Try it in the REPL - it parses it as an
> incomplete expression, and if I add something after I get an error "R not
> defined"...)
>
> I think it's cool that it's possible to define symbols from arbitrary
> strings using e.g. `symbol("<R>")`, but it's kind of clunky that you can't
> refer to them with the colon syntax once they're defined. Is there a way
> around this, or do I have to simply "deal with it"? =)
>
> // T
>
>
> On Thursday, May 1, 2014 7:24:05 AM UTC+2, Ivar Nesje wrote:
>>
>> Symbols in Julia is a special form of strings that are faster for some
>> operations (like comparisons) and much slower for others. Julia uses
>> symbols internally to represent variable names.
>>
>> You create a symbol from a string with the symbol("A") function, or the
>> :A syntax.
>>
>
