[ruby-core:102330] eliminating symbols...

Was just catching up with some of the HashWithIndifferentAccess discussion at
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17472

Could a magic comment (e.g. "# symbols_are_strings: true")
make :foo a shorthand for a frozen 'foo' String?

If you turn your head sideways, the : character can look like ''

That would provide a migration path which would allow reducing
the use of Symbols and maybe get rid of it down-the-line(*).

Implementation-wise, every symbol already has a frozen string
associated with it, so there's no extra memory cost.


(*) I now consider Symbols a mistake of the Ruby language design
    and they should've been only an implementation detail.  This
    is even more so with GC-able symbols nowadays.  But maybe my
    brain is infected by too much Perl5 :P

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