title: What is a "symbol" in Julia?
body: <p>Specifically:
  I am trying to use Julia's DataFrames package, specifically the readtable() function with the names option, but that requires a vector of symbols.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>what is a symbol?</li>
  <li>why would they choose that over a vector of strings?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So far I have found only a handful of references to the word symbol in the Julia language. It seems that symbols are represented by ":var", but it is far from clear to me what they are.</p>
  
  <p>Aside:
  I can run</p>
  
  <pre><code>df = readtable( "table.txt", names = [symbol("var1"), symbol("var2")] )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My two bulleted questions still stand.</p>