From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2006-01-05T11:21:09+09:00
Subject: Re: On Symbols

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:06:00AM +0900, Dave Howell wrote:
> 
> However, although I don't meant to pick on szpak specifically, he did 
> provide a sterling example of what doesn't work, at least for me, and I 
> have worked professionally as a writer of documentation....
> 
> 	"A symbol in Ruby is similar to a symbol in Lisp
> 
> I don't know Lisp. Or Java. Unless you know that your reader is already 
> familiar with your reference, it's not helpful to use it.

To be fair, I think the only reason he discussed the comparison of Ruby
symbols to Lisp symbols is this (I use "he" in the generic here):

I wasn't getting a clear picture of what a Ruby symbol actually was from
most of the comments about it, until I saw some evidence that it bore an
at least passing resemblance to a Lisp symbol.  While I'm no leet lisp
haxxor type, I do have a halfway decent notion of what a symbol is in
Lisp, so I pursued that comparison as a means of helping *me* understand
what a Ruby symbol was, and szpak was responding to that.  In other
words that was kinda directed at me, and it did help me a bit to
understand Ruby symbols, so as a special case explanation it did exactly
what it needed to.

That having been said, if you'd like to try approaching the problem of
uderstanding a Ruby symbol by way of learning what a Lisp symbol is and
differentiating it from a Ruby symbol, let me know.  I'll see if I can
accomodate you.  As far as my understanding of the subject goes, that
seems to be the shortest path from zero to grokking.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);