History
Lisp introduced the notion of interned strings for its symbols. Historically, the data structure used as a string intern pool was called an 'oblist' (when it was implemented as a linked list) or an 'obarray' (when it was implemented as an array).
Modern Lisp dialects typically distinguish symbols from strings; interning a given string returns an existing symbol or creates a new one, whose name is that string. Symbols often have additional properties that strings do not (such as storage for associated values, or namespacing): the distinction is also useful to prevent accidentally comparing an interned string with a not-necessarily-interned string, which could lead to intermittent failures depending on usage patterns.
Read more about this topic: String Interning
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)