Black Rod 1350 by royal letters patent, though the current title dates from 1522. The position was adopted by other members of the Commonwealth when they adopted the British Westminster system. The title is derived from the staff of office, an ebony staff topped with a golden lion, which is the main symbol of the office's authority. A ceremonial rod or staff is a common type of symbol indicating the authority of the office-holder. Depictions of ancient authority figures in many cultures include such a rod (alternatively called a sceptre). Another early example was the fasces (literally a bound bundle of rods)
Symbol table global scope, whether it is imported, and what namespace it belongs to. Some programming languages allow the symbol table to be manipulated at run-time, so that symbols can be added at any time. Racket is an example of such a language. Both the LISP and the Scheme programming languages allow arbitrary, generic properties to be associated with each symbol. The Prolog programming language is essentially a symbol-table manipulation language; symbols are called "atoms", and the relationships between symbols can be reasoned over. Similarly, OpenCog provides a dynamic symbol table, called the "atomspace", which is used for knowledge representation. Symbol table