James Britt wrote:
> 
> After trying to follow all this, I've come to see Symbols as being more 
> akin to numbers than strings.
> 
> They're numbers with a human face.
> 

Thanks, James. That's great.

Incidentally, I was out of town for over a week, so I have just now
read (most of) this 100+ post thread in a single sitting. This is
not an experience I recommend.

I had to reply here, though I held back many times.

If you are an old enough user of Ruby, you remember when a symbol
"really was" a number. There was no Symbol class. If you did a
puts of :foo, you got a number out. :foo could be added to another
number, and basically always acted like a number.

I'm assuming that this number was just the index into a list of
symbols, enabling us to get the string representation back given
the symbol (number).

Anyway, happy new year! This is my first post of 2006.


Hal