From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2005-11-19T13:00:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbol#inspect bug?

On 11/18/05, Eric Mahurin <eric.mahurin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For many of the other core classes (and definitely all other immediate
> classes), #inspect returns a representation that is eval'able to get
> back an equivalent (or the same) object.  When possible, I think that
> is what #inspect should do.  I think it is a bug that Symbol#inspect
> almost does it, but not quite (quotes some cases but not others).

I agree this should be fixed. I wrote something that I think shows all
the problem cases (at least for single characters):

32.upto(126) do |i|
  c = i.chr
  s = ":\"#{c}\""
  if c == "\"" or c == "\\"
    s = ":\"\\#{c}\""
  end
  symbol = eval(s)
  begin
    symbol = eval(symbol.inspect)
  rescue SyntaxError
    puts "Failed to eval inspected form of #{s}"
  end
end

The results:

Failed to eval inspected form of :"!"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"0"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"1"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"2"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"3"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"4"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"5"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"6"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"7"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"8"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"9"
Failed to eval inspected form of :"="
Failed to eval inspected form of :"@"

Ryan