Re: Coercing strings to symbols
Re: Coercing strings to symbols
- Subject: Re: Coercing strings to symbols
- From: "Houston, Brad" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:31:23 -0800
- Thread-topic: Coercing strings to symbols
Thanks to you all. I much prefer knowing that something isn't doable than
just wondering if I'm wasting your time looking or foolishly plunging ahead
with a bad method. Onward with the if..then stacks.
Brad
On 2/15/08 2:59 PM, "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden> wrote:
> 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.
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