I've used symbols as strings before, and it's worked fine. I've also developed an unregistered package to pool elements. It includes a PooledString and PooledStringArray. My main use was for DataFrames. By pooling elements, particularly strings, you can group and sort much faster. Strings are mapped to integers. For this use case, symbols did not work as well. You might find that useful to use or fork.
https://github.com/tshort/PooledElements.jl Here's background from the DataFrames perspective: https://github.com/JuliaStats/DataFrames.jl/issues/895 Hopefully, I'll find the time and ambition to better integrate this package with DataFrames. On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 7:56 AM, Lyndon White <[email protected]> wrote: > @Tamas thanks > Can you clarify a Dict of strings to what? Ints? > Loose a lot of interpretablity that way. > > > On Friday, 22 April 2016 19:08:11 UTC+8, Tamas Papp wrote: >> >> I would be more concerned about style than speed -- symbols as strings >> is an ancient Lisp technique in NLP, but IMO a Dict of strings would be >> better style. >> >> >>
