From: Intransition <transfire@...>
Date: 2011-07-04T04:28:21+09:00
Subject: Re: symbol vs string for hash keys



On Jul 3, 2:31 pm, Robert Dober <robert.do...@gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>> Strings are mutable; symbols are not.
>
> And, IIRC, strings are GCed, while syms are not. I still use symbols
> whenever it seems to make sense though.
> But in case of enormous transient data that might become a problem.

Yea, that's what I was wondering about. In the case of fileutils, I
don't think they are ever going to be GCed, or don't need to be. So I
thought, well maybe there is an upper limit to the number symbols? And
so symbols were avoided simply to not add to that count? But that
seems unlikely. Probably this fileutils code was originally written
before 1.9 moved all method lists to symbols, and it's just stayed
that way.