Language design idea: pure name-spaces

[kpreid]

One of the nice things about Common Lisp is the pervasive use of (its notion of) symbol objects for names. For those unfamiliar, I'll give a quick introduction to the relevant parts of their semantics before going on to my actual proposal for a “good parts version”.

A CL symbol is an object (value, if you prefer). A symbol has a name (which is a

Comments

[ex_juan_gan]

This seems like a good step in the seemingly right direction.
Somehow reminds me RDF.

[kpreid]

Heh, perhaps, but it's interesting to note that RDF actually fails at this. There are several things you can't do in RDF without minting string identifiers; particularly, you can't have an anonymous predicate. You can use local "#foo" URIs, but in principle those are relative to the base URI of the RDF document itself, which is also a string.