From: Ron M Date: 2005-12-31T07:19:49+09:00 Subject: Re: On Symbols Ryan Leavengood wrote: > I don't know, they have always made sense to me... Ruby symbols surprised me a bit because unlike most Lisps, Ruby's symbols aren't garbage collected. I still don't understand if that is an implementation detail or something fundamental about symbols in Ruby that makes them uncollectable. The answer to that question would say a lot about where it's a good idea to use symbols. > Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming: Symbols just are. In all languages with symbols, symbols just are. But in some languages they are, to varying degrees different. > On 12/30/05, Devin Mullins wrote: >>Have any of the explanations in the thread (What is the difference >>between :foo and "foo" ?) helped you understand symbols? The explanations that contrasted Ruby symbols with symbols in other languages helped me. Symbols mostly similar but a little different to Ruby's are present in many languages (Lisp, Dylan). Other languages have similar concepts with a different name (Interned strings in Java). Other languages use the same term to describe something quite different (Lex/Yacc, APL's symbols, a linker's symbol table in C) - but that's mostly a different concept since the running program itself will rarely care about the symbols.