String Interning - History

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:

    “Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
    —Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)

    “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
    —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
    —Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)