Any practical use for Atoms?

Newsgroups	comp.lang.forth
Date	2016-11-14 08:42 -0800
Message-ID	<12a2ec20-009c-4e5b-92b5-e48b0da40aa0@googlegroups.com> (permalink)
Subject	Any practical use for Atoms?
From	trans <transfire@gmail.com>

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I know this is a bit off the wall, but I've been learning Erlang this month. And Erlang has "atoms" which are words that just stand for themselves. They don't represent a variable or a function -- they just are. In a way they are kind of like enums, but you don't have to pre-assign them numbers. Clojure has something similar called "keyword symbols". And Ruby has them too just called "symbols". But they are much more useful in Erlang b/c of pattern matching.

So I started wondering, could Forth use such a construct in practice? Is there any value in it? Or would it be totally useless to Forth?

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Any practical use for Atoms? trans <transfire@gmail.com> - 2016-11-14 08:42 -0800
  Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-11-14 10:48 -0600
    Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-11-14 08:51 -0800
      Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-11-14 12:03 -0600
        Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-11-15 22:31 -0800
          Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-11-16 03:01 -0600
  Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Rod Pemberton <NeedNotReplyHere@xrsevnneqk.cem> - 2016-11-14 16:39 -0500
    Re: Any practical use for Atoms? trans <transfire@gmail.com> - 2016-11-14 14:12 -0800
    Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2016-11-15 03:16 -0800
    Re: Any practical use for Atoms? Gerry Jackson <gerry@jackson9000.fsnet.co.uk> - 2016-11-15 17:46 +0000
      Re: Any practical use for Atoms? trans <transfire@gmail.com> - 2016-11-15 21:00 -0800
        Re: Any practical use for Atoms? albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-11-16 11:55 +0100
          Re: Any practical use for Atoms? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-11-17 13:32 +0000
  Re: Any practical use for Atoms? albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2016-11-15 13:21 +0100

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