From: "Bartosz Dziewoński" <matma.rex@...>
Date: 2012-06-21T06:17:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbols and Strings...

2012/6/20 Henry Maddocks <hmaddocks@me.com>:
>
> On 21/06/2012, at 8:50 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
>> This is an extremely bad idea.
>
> Well a lot of people, including Matz, disagree with you.

I'd like to see where he explicitly disagrees with this.


> The internal representation is of no concern to the programmer, only it's utility.

Wrong. It's as if you said that a linked list and an array are the
same thing and the difference in the implementation is of no concern
to the programmer, since both can support the same interface. Ruby
Strings and Symbols are fundamentally different on every level (as I
explained), and should be used in different contexts, for both code
clarity and performance.


> There seems to be a desire to be able to use String and Symbol interchangeably, hence this discussion.

If Symbol and String have the same function, then one of them should
probably be removed. (Except they don't, in most cases; in the few
cases where they do the programmer should probably suck it up, choose
one representation, stick to it and convert input data to it himself.)


-- Matma Rex