> Strings and symbols are logically distinct things. Strings are used when you want to know what they say, symbols when you want to know what they are.
Fine. But this breaks down anyway when you force people to use (immutable) symbols instead of strings for efficient allocation. When using symbols as keys in hashtables, you do not "want to know what they are", you "want to know what they say".
And unification would possibly have good consequences for simplifying macros and code-as-data (especially if characters are also just strings of length 1). Most code fragments would then literally be strings (most notable exceptions would be numeric literals, list literals and the like).
Actually, in a hash table, I usually don't care what the key says, any more than I care about the name of the variable used to store an integer. I care about it for code readability, but I'm usually not concerned about getting a rogue key (where I do care what it says). In that case, I would either use string keys or (coerce input 'sym).
I'm not convinced that characters being strings of length one is a good idea... it seems like the "character" is actually a useful concept. But I don't have a huge opinion about this.
Code fragments would still be lists, actually: most code involves at least one function application, and that's a list structure. Only the degenerate case of 'var would be a string.
> Actually, in a hash table, I usually don't care what the key says, any more than I care about the name of the variable used to store an integer.
That's fine again, but my point is just that by using symbols as keys in hashtables, you never care about the value part of that symbol (you just need an immutable key); you're not using the symbol "as intended", for value storage.
> most code involves at least one function application, and that's a list structure.
Yep. But in the case where that function application does not contain another function application (or list literal) in any of its argument positions, we would, with my proposal, be talking about a list of strings, which could then again be seen as a string-keyed hash table...
Symbols are not "intended" for value storage, symbols happen to be used for value storage. Symbols have exactly the same properties as, say, named constants in C, and thus fit in the same niche. They also have the properties of variable names, and so fit in that niche too. Symbols are a generally useful datatype, and they are no more intended for just "value storage" than cons cells are intended for just list construction.
A list of strings is still a list, which is not what you said; right now, it's a list of symbols, and I don't see the benefit of a list of strings over a list of symbols.
