Hi cafe,

I use symbols all the time when manipulating code. I vacillate between using stringtable-atom, symbol, and simple-atom. Unfortunately:

Stringtable-atom is has a broken build right now (GHC 7.6). (Also I've had some crashes with it in the past.)
simple-atom has dependency upper bounds that restrict it to GHC <= 7.0
"symbol" has a design flaw, which is that it exposes the constructor for Symbol, which reveals the (nondeterministic) unique Int IDs. I.e. it is not "SafeHaskell".

I submitted a pull request to relax simple-atom, but perhaps there are other packages people use with which I am not aware?

Thanks,

-Ryan