I'm a big fan of explicit symbols, but some syntactic sugar around immutable strings and type inference should let you use "symbols" with little performance pen

I'm a big fan of explicit symbols, but some syntactic sugar around immutable strings and type inference should let you use "symbols" with little performance penalty. Of course by then you might as well use explicit symbols anyway, but I guess there's some additional flexibility. Of course that hurts macro-writing a bit, but not much.