[ruby-core:102337] Re: eliminating symbols...

Agree with @eregon.

In my mind there is a big semantic difference between a Symbol and a
String. Symbols are identifiers meant for developers and the machine. A
program that needs to run in a multi-language environment, all strings
should (ideally) be localized, while no symbols will.

I probably shouldn't even be arguing on the merits of the idea; the
incompatibility alone is reason enough to not change this.

On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 9:41 AM Benoit Daloze <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I believe Symbols have a significant performance advantages compared to
> regular String, i.e., they can always be compared by identity.
> However, if a String would know if it's "interned" in the fstring table,
> then such optimization could be done for fstring Strings too (if both
> operands are fstring Strings).
>
> IMHO, learning the difference between String and Symbol is part of
> learning Ruby.
> Symbol are identifiers or enums, String is basically just data.
>
> On Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 2:13 AM Eric Wong <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> 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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