Hi --

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Jacek Olszak wrote:

> Hi everyone...
>
> I've just read the Pragmatic Programming Ruby book. But I don't understand 
> one thing : why should I use symbols (colon sign before the variable name) 
> ie. :name ?

See the other answers for details and interesting stuff....  I just
wanted to clarify the point that you're not putting the colon before a
variable name, but before the string of which this is the equivalent
symbol.  You can even do:

   :"This is a symbol with whitespace"

or even the String#intern method:

   "So is this".intern


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack / wobblini.net