Lisp and Erlang Atoms, Ruby and Scheme Symbols. How useful are they?

A short example that shows how the ability to manipulate symbols leads to cleaner code: (Code is in Scheme, a dialect of Lisp).

(define men '(socrates plato aristotle))

(define (man? x) 
    (contains? men x))

(define (mortal? x) 
    (man? x))

;; test

> (mortal? 'socrates)
=> #t

You can write this program using character strings or integer constants. But the symbolic version has certain advantages. A symbol is guaranteed to be unique in the system. This makes comparing two symbols as fast as comparing two pointers. This is obviously faster than comparing two strings. Using integer constants allows people to write meaningless code like:

(define SOCRATES 1)
;; ...

(mortal? SOCRATES)
(mortal? -1) ;; ??

Probably a detailed answer to this question could be found in the book Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation.

As a C programmer I had a problem with understanding what Ruby symbols really are. I was enlightened after I saw how symbols are implemented in the source code.

Inside Ruby code, there is a global hash table, strings mapped to integers. All ruby symbols are kept there. Ruby interpreter, during source code parse stage, uses that hash table to convert all symbols to integers. Then internally all symbols are treated as integers. This means that one symbol occupies only 4 bytes of memory and all comparisons are very fast.

So basically you can treat Ruby symbols as strings which are implemented in a very clever way. They look like strings but perform almost like integers.

When a new string is created, then in Ruby a new C structure is allocated to keep that object. For two Ruby strings, there are two pointers to two different memory locations (which may contain the same string). However a symbol is immediately converted to C int type. Therefore there is no way to distinguish two symbols as two different Ruby objects. This is a side effect of the implementation. Just keep this in mind when coding and that's all.

Atoms provide fast equality testing, since they use identity. Compared to enumerated types or integers, they have better semantics (why would you represent an abstract symbolic value by a number anyway?) and they are not restricted to a fixed set of values like enums.

The compromise is that they are more expensive to create than literal strings, since the system needs to know all exising instances to maintain uniqueness; this costs time mostly for the compiler, but it costs memory in O(number of unique atoms).