From: "Stephan Kämper" <Stephan.Kaemper@...>
Date: 2005-11-11T15:52:13+09:00
Subject: Interger( a_symbol ) raises no exception

Hi all,

yesterday at work I tried to program this: Read a simple (YAML) file 
contaning key values pairs and create an object which has accessor 
methods for each pair, the key name being the method name.

All went well until I realised that I'd have to treat integer values in 
a slightly special way.  No problem I thought, evaluate

Integer( current_value )

and if that doesn't raise an exception, go ahead...

To my surprise the Symbols dissappeared and there were ints instead.

irb(main):001:0> Integer :oops
=> 23417

Why doesn't that rains an exception?
I alwasy thought Symbols were closer to Strings than Integers (resp. 
Fixnums), but I might have been wrong.

What's the reason for this behaviour?

I now that there's a unique int associated to each Symbol, but I still 
think that a String like "42" IS more like an Integer, than 
:a_symbol_like_this.

Happy rubying

Stephan