Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote: > On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Phil Stone wrote: > >> Oh! Very good. I didn't realize that an identical symbol would get >> re-used. For completeness' sake, I will make a new [ps-stopwatch] that >> does not leak (and is plain vanilla, to boot). > > Yes, it's re-used, which sort of goes with the fact that it doesn't get > de-allocated, but that is also because it's less trouble (for pd itself) > to have eternal symbols than mortal symbols. > > But the re-use also goes with the fact that it's easier and faster to > compare two symbol addresses (t_symbol *) than two string contents, and > if pd _ensures_ re-use, then two identical addresses _mean_ two identical > strings. > > But all this pd symbol concept comes essentially as-is from 1961 LISP. It > was then adopted by LOGO and Smalltalk in addition to all of the LISP > variants, and then by Ruby, and then the Ruby guys figured out that in > the end, a symbol type could be pretty useless if you had a good enough > string type, so they almost merged them. Most other languages just have > had a string type and improved on that instead of having symbol-vs-string > or just symbols. All this to say I'm in favour of replacing symbols with > strings (while still calling them "symbols" just because).
Is there a difference between symbols and immutable strings like Lua or Java have them? Ciao -- Frank Barknecht Do You RjDj.me? _ ______footils.org__ _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list