Issue #7849 has been updated by trans (Thomas Sawyer). =begin @charliesome Actually, that's exactly what my proposal attempts to address. You don't always have a choice in what type of object you receive, but you want it to become a string. Consider a DSL like Rake's. One could use: task :foo do ... Or task 'foo' do ... Either one is acceptable, and I think it would be overreaching to make people not be able to use a symbol here. On the other hand do we want any object to be acceptable? B/c just about every object responds to #to_s. To avoid this, you would end up with something like: (WARNING! Fugly code ahead.) def task(name) name = (Symbol === name ? name.to_s : name.to_str) ... end There has to be a clearer solution than that. P.S. Just for fun of it I tried this on rake and discovered the Jim decided not to care what get's passed to task. Try this in your Rakefile: desc "OMG!" task Object.new do puts "OMG is right!" end A Duck-typing true beleiver!!! Yea, looks like a bug to me. If the user really needs it they can call #to_s. =end ---------------------------------------- Feature #7849: Symbol#to_str https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7849#change-36318 Author: trans (Thomas Sawyer) Status: Rejected Priority: Normal Assignee: Category: core Target version: next minor Even though a Symbol is not technically an honest-to-goodness String, from the standpoint of simple practicality it would help to have Symbol#to_str defined. There are times when we want an argument to accept a String or a Symbol, but don't really want it to accept any type of object under the sun that responds to #to_s --which is just about anything. This is especially the case when writing DSLs. Having Symbol#to_str is the nice solution to this. Defining Symbol#to_str may be an exception to the rule, but it's one worth making. -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/