From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2005-02-03T13:01:36+09:00
Subject: Re: symbols vs strings vs ?

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Hi --

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, E S wrote:

>> L=E4hett=E4j=E4: James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net>
>> Aihe: Re: symbols vs strings vs ?
>>
>> On Feb 2, 2005, at 7:53 PM, E S wrote:
>>
>>> Always use a Symbol rather than a String, except if you
>>> need to be able to print the string to file/screen/etc.
>>
>> Hmm, don't think I agree with that.  What it you need to modify its
>> contents?  What if you want to use some of String's many helper
>> methods?
>
> The way I thought of it is that if you need to modify a string,
> it's a string that is going to displayed somehow at some point.
>
> For the sake of disambiguity, however, let's amend that to
> "Always use a Symbol rather than a constant String..."

I don't think this rigid a distinction really works out in practice.
For example, let's say you read a string from a file, and then do some
match operations on it.  They don't modify the string (it's constant),
but it's a bit roundabout to do:

   sym =3D file_handle.gets.intern
   if /xyz/.match(sym.to_s) ...


David

--=20
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net
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