From: Daniel Sheppard <daniels@...>
Date: 2005-11-09T07:44:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Question about symbols

Symbols are immutable memory-saving strings.

Say, you had a 100 objects that contained hashes of key/values.

if each of those objects had:

{ 'monkey' => true }

You'd be storing the string 'monkey' 100 times in memory. If you use

{ :monkey => true }

Then all the objects would be looking at the same symbol. 

I also believe that symbol comparison is much faster than string
comparison, but I've never benchmarked it.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jacek Olszak [mailto:jacekolszak@o2.pl] 
> Sent: Wednesday, 9 November 2005 9:36 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Question about symbols
> 
> Hi everyone...
> 
> I've just read the Pragmatic Programming Ruby book. But I 
> don't understand one thing : why should I use symbols (colon 
> sign before the variable name) ie. :name ?
> 
> Regards
> Jacek
> http://jacekolszak.blogspot.com
> 
> 
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