Can anyone make a case for ever using String.intern? It seems to be nothing more than an alias to to_sym on String, and since it's not defined on Symbol, you can't ducktype a var to get a symbol. I'm trying to understand why this even exists in the Ruby language, it doesn't seem like it would be useful for anything. variable.to_sym seems to be the safer route to always use. Thanks, ian -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.