Re:Scriptable Operating Systems with Lua [pdf]
by to3m on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @03:00PM
(#8396886)
Immutable and interned!
(This may or may not be an issue, but it still offended me somewhat, since you're getting all of the compile-time cost at runtime, combined with none of the expressiveness. Not a tradeoff that impresses me, personally, even if the speed is fine - but it takes all sorts.)
The efficiency argument is a common one for symbols in general, but in Lua it doesn't really hold because string comparison has constant cost (ie, it's a simple pointer test, since strings are immutable).