From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-12-04T02:16:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Inconsistency while playing with Symbol in IRB

Hi,

In message "Inconsistency while playing with Symbol in IRB"
    on 02/12/04, "Mills Thomas (app1tam)" <app1tam@ups.com> writes:

|Can I assume that the following inconsistency (See the diff between cmd 1
|and cmd 2) has something to do with the eval-print loop in IRB and not
|something internal to Ruby (after all, cmd 3 works)?

I'm not sure what you meant by "inconsistency".

|irb(main):021:0> print "some string with blanks".intern
|some string with blanksnil

"print" prints symbols by "to_s".  So printed string is "some string
with blanks", and its returned value is "nil"

|irb(main):022:0> p ("some string with blanks".intern)
|:some string with blanks
|nil

"p" prints symbols by "intern" with a newline.  So printed string is
":some string with blanks\n", and its returned value is "nil"

|irb(main):023:0> print "some string with blanks".intern == ("some string
|with blanks".intern) ? "Equal" : "Not Equal"
|Equalnil

So even though their representation is different, they are still same
symbols.

							matz.