3.5 Symbols

Symbols in Slate are basically a large group of Strings sorted by identity into a global table Symbols. A new Symbol is created or identified by taking a String and calling the intern method on it (or alternately, the context message intern:). Repeatedly intern'ing a same String value or Symbol object will return the exact same Symbol object. In order to perform String operations (see the Sequence and String sections[*]), the Symbol must be asked for its name which gives a separate String with its value; the results of these operations will still be Strings and again must be intern'ed to create a new Symbol.



Brian T. Rice 2005-06-08