From: Luciano Ramalho <ramalho@...>
Date: 2007-03-07T10:13:57+09:00
Subject: Paul Graham explains Ruby symbols

Paul Graham offers this excellent explanation for the symbol type:

"Symbols are effectively pointers to strings stored in a hash table.
So you can test equality by comparing a pointer, instead of comparing
each character." [1]

Of course, he's talking about symbols in Lisp, but what he says
applies equally well to Ruby and Smalltalk.

Cheers,

Luciano

[1] http://paulgraham.com/icad.html