From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-11T00:01:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Immediate values

Robert Klemme wrote:

> Totally agree!  And it doesn't make a difference from the usage point of
> view since instances of Symbol, Fixnum, TrueClass, FalseClass, NilClass
> are immutable.

Note that there is a small difference for Symbols and Fixnums. You can 
not define singleton methods on those objects. Maybe external singleton 
classes that work like exivars would help with that.

> Addenum: it's especially noteworthy that strings literals are treated
> differently from true, false, Fixnums and Symbols.  They create a new
> string instance on each evaluation.

But note that literals with the same content will actually share the 
String buffer.