On 30/12/05, Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com> wrote: > rephrase: > "the behavior of the language as regards the use of symbols" > > Does that help? > > Just replace all references to the behavior of symbols with whatever is > necessary, in your world-view, to map to the concept of what happens > when you use symbols in your source code. Not really. I think James's description is pretty good, and agree that it needs expansion. However, I don't think that the Ruby language behaves in any particular way relating to Symbols or their use. I'm not sure how to get it clearer than that. The Ruby language doesn't really behave in a particular way with respect to Fixnums that impacts most developers who *use* the language. The implementation has to deal with them specially, and there are corner cases related to the current implementation's use of 31 bits and the upsize and downsize between BigDecimal, but that is, as I'm saying, an implementation issue and not something I see as intrinsic to the language. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * Alternate: austin / halostatue.ca