@tombray

There’s lots of material out there trying to help Ruby newcomers understand symbols, but I thought this little bit of code might help clear things up:

class Foo
  attr_accessor :test
  
  def initialize
    puts :test.object_id
  end
end

class Bar
  attr_accessor :test
  
  def initialize
    puts :test.object_id
  end  
end

b = Foo.new
c = Bar.new

The initialize method of each of these classes prints out the id of the :test symbol, which will always be the same because a symbol is just a globally unique identifier.  Foo and Bar can have different values for test, the symbol :test is just used by the attr_accessor method to generate getters and setters.  ActionScript developers who are familiar with using objects as keys in a Dictionary will notice some similarities.