Symbols in Slate are basically a large group of Strings sorted by identity into a global table Symbols. A new Symbol is created or identified by taking a String and calling the intern method on it (or alternately, the context message intern:). Repeatedly intern'ing a same String value or Symbol object will return the exact same Symbol object. In order to perform String operations (see the Sequence and String sections3.8.2), the Symbol must be asked for its name which gives a separate String with its value; the results of these operations will still be Strings and again must be intern'ed to create a new Symbol.