If you have immutable strings and a smart compiler, yes, you could indeed have strings and symbols that are functionally identical. In fact, in Old Lisp, there

If you have immutable strings and a smart compiler, yes, you could indeed have strings and symbols that are functionally identical. In fact, in Old Lisp, there were no strings and symbols were used for everything we use strings for now; that lead to weak string handling and it's why Common Lisp and all modern Lisp variants have a string type.