Lisp and Erlang Atoms, Ruby and Scheme Symbols. How useful are they?

Question

How useful is the feature of having an atom data type in a programming language?

A few programming languages have the concept of atom or symbol to represent a consta

Answer 1

Atoms (in Erlang or Prolog, etc.) or symbols (in Lisp or Ruby, etc.)—from herein only called atoms—are very useful when you have a semantic value that has no natural underlying "native" representation. They take the space of C-style enums like this:

enum days { MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY, SUNDAY }

The difference is that atoms don't typically have to be declared and they have NO underlying representation to worry about. The atom monday in Erlang or Prolog has the value of "the atom monday" and nothing more or less.

While it is true that you could get much of the same use out of string types as you would out of atoms, there are some advantages to the latter. First, because atoms are guaranteed to be unique (behind the scenes their string representations are converted into some form of easily-tested ID) it is far quicker to compare them than it is to compare equivalent strings. Second, they are indivisible. The atom monday cannot be tested to see if it ends in day for example. It is a pure, indivisible semantic unit. You have less conceptual overloading than you would in a string representation in other words.

You could also get much of the same benefit with C-style enumerations. The comparison speed in particular is, if anything, faster. But... it's an integer. And you can do weird things like have SATURDAY and SUNDAY translate to the same value:

enum days { SATURDAY, SUNDAY = 0, MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY }

This means you can't trust different "symbols" (enumerations) to be different things and thus makes reasoning about code a lot more difficult. Too, sending enumerated types through a wire protocol is problematical because there's no way to distinguish between them and regular integers. Atoms do not have this problem. An atom is not an integer and will never look like one behind the scenes.