From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2002-12-01T09:53:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Document

Hi Shannon,

> If :a is independent to any other variable, it can only be a
> "immutable" or very economic string, what's the big deal?

Yes, exactly.  :a is not any kind of variable at all, nor is it
bound to any kind of variable.  It, indeed, is an immutable,
economic, singleton construction of the string "a".

What's the big deal?  Well, ... does something have to be a Big
Deal to be useful? :)


I like symbols in Ruby a lot.  Smalltalk has them (but my 
Smalltalk is rusty so I don't remember it there's a special
syntax for them); and Java has them 
( http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#intern() )
but what I think is so fantastic in Ruby is the ability to
specify a symbol syntactically without cluttering up the
code.  :name is so much nicer and easier to read than
"name".intern...  So with Ruby we can utilize symbols for
certain kinds of constants, and, I think make the code very
readable.

    @state = :login

  # . . . . .
 
    case @state
      when :login  then session_handle_login(line)
      when :passwd then session_handle_passwd(line)
      when :shell  then session_handle_shell(line)
    end


So maybe no big deal, but, I think Ruby would be diminished if it
didn't have symbols so syntactically convenient..


Regards,

Bill