Symbol

[lfkdsk]

A symbol is an object with a simple string representation that (by default) is guaranteed to be interned; i.e., any two symbols that are written the same are the same object in memory (reference equality).

Why do Lisps have symbols? Well, it's largely an artifact of the fact that Lisps embed their own syntax as a data type of the language. Compilers and interpreters use symbols to represent identifiers in a program; since Lisp allows you to represent a program's syntax as data, it provides symbols because they're part of the representation.

What are they useful apart from that? Well, a few things:

• Lisp is commonly used to implement embedded domain-specific languages. Many of the techniques used for that come from the compiler world, so symbols are an useful tool here.
• Macros in Common Lisp usually involve dealing with symbols in more detail than this answer provides. (Though in particular, generation of unique identifiers for macro expansions requires being able to generate a symbol that's guaranteed never to be equal to any other.)
• Fixed enumeration types are better implemented as symbols than strings, because symbols can be compared by reference equality.
  There are many data structures you can construct where you can get a performance benefit from using symbols and reference equality.