From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2007-05-16T20:05:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Why was the "Symbol is a String"-idea dropped?



On May 16, 5:44 am, "Sven Suska (enduro)" <sven71...@suska.org> wrote:
> Subclassing alone would not be enough, to solve the problem above,
> also, String#== and Symbol#== would have to be defined such that  "a" == :a
> And also #hash would have to be defined accordingly.
>
> Then you would still have the two different kinds of objects ("a" and :a)
> but they would behave quite the same  except for modifying methods.

While I think Symbol probably could use at least few of String's
manipulation methods, putting that aside, I wonder how it would effect
things just to make :a == "a" ?

> Now, as I am writing this, I doubt that the advantages
> of the unification are really worth doing it...
>
> It depends on factors not known to me.
>
> But now, I think I can understand the core-team's decision better.

Thanks for this excellent summary.

T.