Creating Symbols

A symbol can be introduced into the system with the intern function.

intern name

Function

intern returns the interned symbol with the name name. name can be either an Lpp String or a char* string. The name argument can be composed of any characters unless it is a char* in which case the character 0 is not allowed. If the symbol name has not been interned yet then it is interned first.

Lpp symbol are are case sensitive. So, for example, Red and red are two different symbols.

The S macro provides a short hand for entering symbols.

S name

Macro

This macro returns an Lpp Symbol with print name name. The name argument is not escaped with double quotes. Note that for some sequence of characters chars

     S(chars) == intern("chars")
     

For example:

     let sym1 = S(red);
     let sym2 = intern("red");
     sym1 == sym2 => 1
     eq(sym1, sym2) => t
     

Note that creating a symbol with S in an Lpp program is not the same as quoting a symbol in a Common Lisp program. In a Common Lisp program the quoted symbol causes intern to be called only on reading the program, however in a C++ program intern will be called when the code is running. So for example

     let sym1 = S(red);
     let list1 = list(sym1, sym1);
     

is slightly more efficient than

             let list1 = list(S(red), S(red));
     

In both cases only one Symbol red is created, but in the second case intern is called twice, the second time simply returning the already interned symbol red.

unintern symbol

Function

unintern removes the symbol symbol from the system. It returns nil.