From: Charles Oliver Nutter <Charles.O.Nutter@...>
Date: 2006-10-19T08:58:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbol < String in Ruby > 1.8

Jim Weirich wrote:
> Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
>> Fair enough if Symbols are more like Strings that have identity, but 
>> what of the narrowing of String's abilities in the Symbol subclass? If 
>> Symbol "is a" String, why will so many of String's methods be 
>> immediately unavailable?
> 
>  From a standpoint of the number of String methods available,  it looks 
> like :abc will be similar to "abc".freeze.

As Sam mentions in another post...what then is the difference between a 
Symbol and a frozen String? Why have a separate type?

If there's a difference that's incompatible with String's behavior as a 
supertype, I don't think Symbol < String is valid. If there's no 
difference, I'm not sure I see the point in having Symbol.

It seems to me that at best, Symbol exhibits some String-like behavior, 
but I wouldn't ever have thought Symbol "is a" String.

Or perhaps Symbol "has a" String rather than "is a" String? I would be 
comfortable with that.

String < Symbol is another option, but that would imply that all Strings 
are Symbols...that seems even less valid than saying all Symbols are 
Strings.

-- 
Charles Oliver Nutter, JRuby Core Developer
headius@headius.com -- charles.o.nutter@sun.com
Blogging at headius.blogspot.com