[bigtunacan]

Girvo, I was not saying that within the context of how PHP operates symbols/atoms would be beneficial.

The parent stated, "Sorry, but those are entirely trivial syntactic issues, and not very interesting at that either..."

My point was that symbols/atoms are much more than just a syntactic difference and that they are in fact quite interesting. Chicago Boss, an Erlang framework, takes these ideas to an extreme to push the limits of shared immutable memory on a web server.

http://www.chicagoboss.org/about.htm

I'm not a big fan of the way he trashes pretty much every alternative at the beginning of his description; there are many web frameworks built on many different languages that the market has proved out are sufficiently scalable.

It is however an interesting and different approach that I think we can both agree goes far beyond "trivial syntactic issues".