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

A Ruby implementation typically has a table in which it stores the names of all classes, methods and variables. It refers to say a method name by the position in the table, avoiding expensive string comparisons. But you can use this table too and add values to it: symbols.

If you write code that uses strings as identifiers rather than for their textual content, consider symbols. If you write a method that expects an argument to be either 'male' or 'female', consider using :male and :female . Comparing two symbols for equality is faster than strings (that's why symbols make good hash keys).