From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" Date: 2012-02-10T20:58:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Symbol garbage collection On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Robert Klemme wrote: > On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Dido Sevilla wrote: >> I've always wondered why Ruby didn't do garbage collection of symbols, >> when Lisp implementations here and there did so, and in fact they are >> essential in macro programming because Lisp programs tend to create a >> lot of unique symbols at runtime, especially in macro code, with such >> contrivances as gensym in Scheme and Common Lisp and uniq in Arc. > > In Ruby the idea is rather to only use a fixed amount of Symbols in > the program and use Strings for everything that changes often. I have a question about this rule of thumb: did this rule came to existence precisely due to the fact that Symbols are not GCed, or was it the other way around? Maybe if Symbols' garbage collection wasn't a problem, that rule about using them just in a limited and fixed amount would have never existed. Just asking... Jesus.