Comment by lloeki

I (and GP given their use of capitalised Symbol) was talking about Ruby symbols, which for the most part are more equivalent to their object_id than to their textual representation.

What I mean by "integer" is not "pointer", it's "natural number", in the sense that there exists only one `1` vs you can have multiple textual "foo" strings.

So it's more useful to think of symbols as natural numbers which you don't know nor care the actual value of, because as a human you only care about the label you have attached to it, but you do care about its numberness property of it conceptually existing only once.