From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-05-15T23:53:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Why was the "Symbol is a String"-idea dropped?

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 10:54:05PM +0900, Robert Dober wrote:
> On 5/15/07, Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> >But then what you want are not symbols, but true immutable strings. By that
> >I mean: some object where I can write 10MB of binary dump. If I want to add
> >one character to the end of it, then I create another object containing
> >10MB+1byte of binary dump, and the old 10MB object is garbage-collected.
> But of course we have immutable strings already :)))
> 
> class IString < String
>   def initialize str
>     super(str)
>     freeze
>   end
> end

Yes, but it's not a singleton.

It would only be of interest as a Symbol replacement if IString.new("foo")
always returned the same object. You could implement this using the Multiton
pattern I think.

Then you could safely use IString#object_id as a method name key.

Regards,

Brian.