-talkers, Today I saw a blog by Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, on www.artima.com in which he criticized Ruby's mutable strings - saying that of such a horror he could ne'er conceive, or something :) Anyway, all the discussion I've seen about (im)mutable strings has focused on implementation and efficiency. LISP may be a counter-example, but I'm not sure, and its paradigm is different. I'd like to know what the design considerations are. So, is van Rossum's point valid? I must say, immutable strings sound elegant to me for some reason I can't work out, but then Ruby has oh-so-cool symbols anyway. What are the pros and cons of Ruby and Python on the string department? BTW the URL for that blog is http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=7589 Gavin