> In fact, I've wondered about the origins of the term "intern" since I first heard of it; the technique was already known to me and likely others as "tokenisin

> In fact, I've wondered about the origins of the term "intern" since I first heard of it; the technique was already known to me and likely others as "tokenising" before that, however, since compilers would often have to compare identifiers and doing this to them made it much faster. My first hearing of it was in conjunction with LISP macros, or more specifically creating hygenic LISP macros. I'm pretty sure it goes way back. You can see an example of this here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/30016344 http://stackoverflow.com/a/30016344