From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-12-30T11:36:06+09:00
Subject: Re: What is the difference between :foo and "foo" ?

Austin Ziegler wrote:

>The Symbol is just a name.
>  
>
Er... a thing that /has/ a name. (That being, Symbol#to_s.)

A symbol's just a thing. :apple == :apple. :apple.to_s == "apple". 
:apple.to_i == 23417. The end.*

AFAIK, you *can* use a String to do all the things you would do with a 
Symbol (i.e. identify things)+, but using Symbols is more fun! (More 
performant, possibly, for the purpose of static identifiers, and a 
little less line noise, when used as the key to a hash, for example. 
Plus, if you're using a text editor with syntax highlighting, they'll 
show up a different color, which is fun.)

Devin
* Though I'm not a very good one, I'm a mathematician at heart, so I 
like to define things by their properties.
+ This is because all the builtin methods that are meant to take a 
Symbol as a parameter tend to call its #== or #eql? or #hash or #to_s 
method (the properties of which String mimicks, to an isomorphism), or 
allow a String to be passed in its place (as is the case with attr_*, e.g.).