Using Ruby Symbols

Question

First time I tried learning Ruby was 2 years ago, now I have started again. The reason I stopped was because I could not understand the Symbol class. And now I am at the sam

Answer 1

The O'Reilly Ruby Cookbook (p. 15) quotes Jim Weirich as saying:

• If the contents (the sequence of characters) of the object are important, use a string.
• If the identity of the object is important, use a symbol.

Symbols are generally used as hash keys, because it's the identity of the key that's important. Symbols are also required when passing messages using certain methods like Object#send.