Re: Why strings? (was Re: GTK problem)

["Daniel Solaz" <dsolaz sistelcom com>]

Alan Shutko wrote:
>O>(The terminology is that to ask the server to assign an integer for
>O>a string is to "intern" it - beats me why)
>The terminology is from Lisp.  More than that, I cannot
>explain, since I'm very sketchy on that level of lisp.
In Lisp you intern a symbol in a package (which is a name space) so it
has a meaning *inside* it; there's always a current package, and you get
external symbols with "package:symbol" (for symbols exported by package)
or "package::symbol" (for symbols private to package).
Given that C lacks symbols, if hashing really means no performance loss
then GTK's solution is a good one.
-Daniel