Eric Hodel
7/28/2008 9:29:00 PM
On Jul 28, 2008, at 14:07 PM, Ian Hunter wrote:
> 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.
#intern came first, #to_sym is an alias of #intern.
> 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.
It's useful for backwards compatibility.