create_table

rubyonrails-talk
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"string" :string

one has two quote marks; the other only one colon.

But "less keystrokes" is a glib argument in favour of symbols... a better reason for using symbols over strings is that symbols are more efficient in memory. They act like pointers to a single string, where quoted-strings all exist individually in memory, so if you use the same string a lot, you use lots more memory than if you use the same symbol a lot.

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Michael Pavling wrote:

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The difference is that a given symbol only exists in memory once whereas you could have many copies of an identical string floating around, each using however many bytes. The flipside is that symbols are never released. See also has_many :through - Symbols are not pretty strings

Fred