From: Matt Todd <chiology@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T05:39:54+09:00
Subject: Re: does ":" have an anolog in another language?

In my example, using a symbol would be the same as creating a symbol
object (whose initialize() method was overwritten to pull a
Unique-Singleton deal):

{ :foo => "bar" }

is the same as

{ Symbol.new('foo') => "bar" }

(That is, if Symbol had #new defined).

It's like saying...

"Hello"

does the same thing as

String.new('hello')

except that it doesn't create a new object for duplicate values, it
simply returns the reference to the previous Symbol object created.

M.T.