From: kendear <summercoolness@...>
Date: 2007-09-16T09:40:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie help

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On 9/15/07, Ali Koubeissi <ali.koubeissi@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey, I've started with Ruby two days ago, and I have some questions.
>
> 1- What's the use of Symbols? I've read that symbols are (Symbols are
> lightweight strings. Usually, symbols are used in situations where you
> need a string but you won't be printing it to the screen.), however I
> cannot understand how to use them, and so I tried to read some examples
> and I got this:



you can think of symbol as string... except symbol is always identical if it
has the same name...

i think you can think of it as:

when Ruby see a new symbol, it gives it an ID of 1
then next time it sees a different label, it gives it an ID of 2

so when a symbol is used as a hash key, it is just using "1" as the ID
instead of a string... which will save the time of processing the string and
help the program run faster...

although internally, i wonder whether it is 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, or the pointer
to the symbol object like  0x32fe117F  which is still a unique ID....

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