From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-05-16T00:03:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Why was the "Symbol is a String"-idea dropped?

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 11:53:08PM +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> 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.

P.S. I'm aware of Symbol#to_i, but to_i and object_id appear to be
intimately related:

irb(main):001:0> :foo.to_i
=> 14817
irb(main):002:0> :foo.object_id
=> 148178
irb(main):003:0> :bar.to_i
=> 16081
irb(main):004:0> :bar.object_id
=> 160818
irb(main):005:0> :zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.to_i
=> 16089
irb(main):006:0> :zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.object_id
=> 160898
irb(main):007:0> :puts.to_i
=> 7345
irb(main):008:0> :puts.object_id
=> 73458
irb(main):009:0>

i.e. I don't think the symbol table maintains an explicit integer key for
each symbol.