[Rails] Re: Learning About Symbols

Symbols are used all the time in Ruby/Rails when sending methods.

For example, look at the following method call:

  instance.do_stuff(:foo => :bar, :answer => 3)

What you are actually sending to the do_stuff method is a hash that looks like the following:

 { :foo => :bar, :answer => 3 }

For these purposes, they are basically human-readable identifiers. The advantage they have over strings in this case is that they are re-used, so if you use :foo in your application 100 times, it's only in memory once. Whereas if you use "foo" 100 times, it's in memory 100 times.

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