I am fairly new to Crystal, being a Ruby programmer for many years. One of the main reasons that I looked at Crystal is that it is so Ruby-like, and that means I can port existing quite a bit of Ruby code relatively easily. I have a concern when there is serious talk about making Crystal less Ruby-l…

In case anyone wants to try, all that is needed to implement dynamic Symbols is the ability to query the number of predefined Symbols: # src/compiler/crystal/codegen/primitives.cr class Crystal::CodeGenVisitor def codegen_primitive(call, node, target_def, call_args) @call_location = call.try &…

[image] HertzDevil: if Symbols are used in this capacity, then one can simply use the Strings and the StringPool directly I miss symbols a lot because I also used them as a different type to strings in ruby. Like: a method would react differently depending if it received a numeric, a symbol o…

Could you give an example of such an API?

[image] anon69898395: Imo they also make code far better readable, This is by far the most important thing they do for me. [image] anon69898395: Imo they bring a lot more benefits then just a performance boost for ruby. And while Crystal might not need them for the performance boost, I t…

Personally I do not like symbols at all. People invented hash with indifferent access just to bypass it. I would use enums instead of symbols.

I don’t know if it’s used in any open source projects this way, of it those which those would be, but this here for example is something I use exactly like this or just with small modifications in many of my projects. # here I use symbols as a second type of String class X class << self de…

[image] cyangle: use enums instead of symbols Enums often don’t fit (but I admit, often or at least sometimes they would), but even worse: they can’t be created at runtime either.

[image] cyangle: People invented hash with indifferent access just to bypass it. No, can’t agree with this. People invented hash with indifferent access as a convenience method for the specific usecase of symbols as hash keys and I can see why. In untidy code-bases where no style guide exist…

You can always use enums and strings to replace symbols. If you really have to use symbols, you can use a custom class instead. I consider symbol to be a useless language primitive that causes more troubles than benefits so I would prefer removing it from Crystal Lang. Python doesn’t have a symbol…

[image] cyangle: Python doesn’t have a symbol type and works fine. Python in general works fine, why don’t you just use that? The answer is probably: because Crystal has features that i like. So, using Python as an argument why Crystal should not have symbols is just null and void. [ima…

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