From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-05-09T19:56:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Equality question

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 09:58:46AM +0900, John Joyce wrote:
> What's more confusing? Try messing with symbols in your hashes. Then  
> wrap your head around it.
> I finally got a handle on symbols. They're like hard links in unix.  
> little wormholes if you will.

That I don't have a problem with.

A symbol is basically an immutable string, which is also a singleton.

That is,

    a = :foo
    b = :foo
    c = "foo".to_sym

will always return the exact same object for a, b and c.