Hi Ana, > As Tomas didn't show up in IRC since a few days, I suspect he is > offline for some reason. So let me try as far as I'm able.
I just returned from Japan so sorry for my late response. >> first, is this the correct venue for asking questions for wl.java? > Sure. Definitely;-) >> was looking at wl.java and saw Nsym and Asym. my question is, what's >> the reason for differentiating between the two? the only difference is >> is that an Nsym has a name attribute and Asym does not. > > Probably, "Nsym" means "named symbol", and "Asym" means "anonymous > symbol" then. To me it makes sense to differentiate between the two as > they show different behavior during creation, printing and other name > processing. > > >> reflecting upon it more, is Asym used often enough for it to have a >> class of it's own? (the answer might be 'yes' but i want to delve >> deeper into insights of the implementation). > > In some programgs, there are a lot more anonymous symbols then named > symbols. > > Named symbols are either thought up by the programmer (then they'll be > very few) or read from some external source like a dictionary (even then > they'll be limited to a few thousand). Anonymous symbols, however, may > be created at runtime in arbitrary numbers (think of a database with > billions of objects). Named and anonymous symbols are concepts from picolisp, not unique to wl. I couldn't possibly explain the difference better than Alex;-) Cheers, Tomas -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
