-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: [email protected]
there’s no direct semantic connection to your variable called ‘a’.
Well, that just makes it even more like Lisp than I was thinking. It
hadn’t occurred to me
that Ruby creates a symbol for a variable. But I guess it makes sense
given some code I’ve seen that uses symbols to name methods and
attributes and the like. assigning b = :a is like doing (setf b 'a) in
Lisp, b contains a symbol, not 1 or a reference to the variable a itself
or anything like that. What I wonder then, is what happens in Ruby if
you were to then call eval(b) ? I haven’t tried it.
–ch–