From: Jeremy Henty <jeremy@...>
Date: 2006-10-19T07:50:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Performance of ruby hashes

On 2006-10-18, James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:

> You're behind on the news.  ;)
>
> Symbols just became a String subclass in Ruby 1.9.

That doesn't preclude them being immediate values; an object's class
is independent of its internal TYPE.  Check out "eigenclass - Changes
in Ruby 1.9" at
<URL:http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?Changes+in+Ruby+1.9> and see the
discussion under the heading "Hash#_compare_by_identity and
Hash#compare_by_identity?".  This states that :c and :c are still
always the same object, whereas "c" and "c" are still in general
different.  I think this shows that Symbols remain immediate.  Unless
I've misunderstood something, of course.

Regards, 

Jeremy Henty