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From: Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>
To: Help Gnu Emacs mailing list <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
Subject: [OT] What langauges have symbols?
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2017 06:24:19 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87efu2w1ak.fsf@jane> (raw)

Hi there,

this is clearly OT, but where could I ask that?

What langauges besides Lisps have "symbols"?  And I not only mean the
name, of course, but also the properties.  For instance, ES6 seems to
have something similar, but it seems to me that you can't have
a variable containing a symbol and say something like
(set var val)
where val is assigned to a variable whose name is the value of var
(i.e., that symbol).

In Elisp, OTOH, you can say e.g.

(set (intern "some-string") 123)
(+ some-string 1)

and obtain 124.  My point here is that you can now use a variable called
"some-symbol" without any additional syntax sugar.  In yet another
words, we have both set and setq, whereas most languages seem to only
have an equivalent of setq.

TIA,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski



             reply	other threads:[~2017-06-30  4:24 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-06-30  4:24 Marcin Borkowski [this message]
2017-06-30  5:15 ` [OT] What langauges have symbols? Yuri Khan
2017-06-30  6:10 ` Eli Zaretskii
2017-07-01  0:59 ` Danny YUE
2017-07-01  3:11   ` Emanuel Berg

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