Post #1404596
2026-03-21 14:42 UTC
@nasser i’d not made that connection. Seems right.
I think the reason we overload display names as symbol identifiers in programming languages is because (in almost all cases) we expect our code to exist in plain text files we directly edit with very little additional tooling. As such, we don’t have a lot of choice.
But it doesn’t have to be like that, and I (for one) predict the advantages of richer representations for code will eventually be too strong to ignore.
Replies (1)
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@nasser@merveilles.town 2026-03-21 16:22
@benjohn yeah, and strictly speaking even maintaining simple text files as an interface does not require display names and canonical names to be the same thing. source code almost invariably compiles into some other form with automatically generated names whether it's binary or bytecode or something else.