Re: Coercing strings to symbols
Re: Coercing strings to symbols
- Subject: Re: Coercing strings to symbols
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:59:40 -0500
On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 3:18 PM, has <email@hidden> wrote:
> I assume you mean 'constants', to use AppleScript's somewhat confusing
> parlance. (Other languages use the proper terms 'enumerators' and
> 'enumerations'/'enumerated types'.)
They are nevertheless constants, which is a fine thing to call them.
Nothing confusing about it.
> Longer answer: this sort of thing is trivial in other, more
> capable languages such as Python, Ruby and ObjC, e.g.:
>
> #!/usr/bin/env ruby
>
> string = "center"
> symbol = string.intern
>
> p symbol
> # :center
Bogus example. Sure, if you were designing an API natively in Ruby
and you had to represent a list of possible values, symbols would be a
logical choice. But in general you still have the problem of names vs
strings where the value of the name is not simply the interned version
of the string. For instance, the value of Socket::SOCK_DGRAM (which
is called a "constant" in the library doc, btw) is 2, not :SOCK_DGRAM.
It's true that languages like Ruby make it easier to do the
string->other decoding, since you can use a hash table instead of
conditional branches, but the ability to intern symbols doesn't enter
into it.
--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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