From: Paul Lynch <paul@...>
Date: 2006-08-10T05:08:09+09:00
Subject: Re: does ":" have an anolog in another language?


On 9 Aug 2006, at 15:15, ngoc wrote:

>> Symbols can best be described as identities. A symbol is all about  
>> who
>> it is, not what it is. Fire up irb and see the difference:
> Many persons use advanced language to explain Symbols to make it  
> more difficult.
> For me, it is a text string like any other text string. But you can  
> not  manipulate it like split, sub!, etc.... There are only 4  
> methods (id2name  inspect  to_i  to_s) for it.
>
> Use it for hash key instead of normal string. (we do not need all  
> manipulating functions for hash key)
>
> Is it simple enough?

What works for me is to think of a symbol as a uniqued constant (or  
immutable) string.  This may depend on my language background,  
however (Objective C, largely).

Paul