[Cuis-dev] Thoughts about symbols

[Luciano Notarfrancesco]

It is interesting to imagine what other things a symbol could be, if not
text, for example in a graphical language. However I don’t see a clear
benefit for Cuis in allowing arbitrary objects for symbols instead of only
strings, and it would be difficult, as you point out, because everywhere in
the image we assume they are strings and they correspond to identifiers and
message selectors following the grammar rules (binaries with some set of
characters, keywords with colons before each arguments, etc). AFAIK the VM
doesn’t care what selectors are tho… they could be SmallIntegers, or
Morphs...

Interesting that in Bee #abc ~= ‘abc’… is there a good reason to do that?
In Cuis they are equal.

Regards,
Luciano


On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 20:24 Javier Pimás <elpochodelagente at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Now that the thread has been resurrected. I also thought about this when
> working on Bee. A
> symbol being a holder of a token _and_ also an arity. I always thought of
> parsing elements and
> counting colons an unpleasant part of Symbol design.
>
> We never tried it, as it would take quite some work, and I feared we could
> find some insurmountable
> problem in the road ending with a waste of too much time. The extra
> benefit of dropping the duplicated
> unicode/String hierarchy was motivating though.
>
> Some questions I got at that moment:
> - How would equality between String and Symbol work (in Bee #abc = 'abc'
> is false).
> - What would be the required protocol for the token? Can we have horses as
> tokens? what if they move a leg :)
> - The token would become something opaque, without needing to be a String,
> hence without its api, would that be good or bad?
>
> Best regards,
> Pocho
>
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 9:38 AM Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev <
> cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 19:33 Luciano Notarfrancesco <luchiano at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I tend to think of #= as an equivalence relation, and #== as the actual
>>> equality of set theory.
>>>
>>
>> I mean, not really “the equality of set theory”, but the underlying, most
>> basic equality of elements (instances) in Smalltak.
>>
>>>
>>> --
>> Cuis-dev mailing list
>> Cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st
>> https://lists.cuis.st/mailman/listinfo/cuis-dev
>>
>
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