It became apparent that treating symbols, like strings, as lists of characters and making the character function look up the symbol name in the environment was causing problems.

1. Inefficient - many list nodes were created. Required conversion to internal string formats for name lookup.
2. Macro Problems - raises complex issues around the handling of hygienic macros. As symbols are re-named what happens if you slice up a name etc.
3. Nearly Useless - very rarely does one want to manipulate a symbol as a string.

Resolution

Instead of using strings (lists of characters) as symbols a symbol type was added. This solved the above problems while introducing very few issues/extra requirements. Since that time I have also realized that it is not that different from the lambda calculus where variable names are indeed an entity independent of the functions in the system.

jwalker@cs.oberlin.edu