From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2005-11-11T18:04:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Interger( a_symbol ) raises no exception

On Nov 10, 2005, at 10:52 PM, Stephan K�mper wrote:

> 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.

Symbols were originally just numbers, so they have #to_int defined  
for backwards compatibility.

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://segment7.net
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