[inferiorhuman]

Ah hah, you've discovered how long it's been since I've thought about Ruby performance.

  One important advantage of symbols versus strings is that Symbol#== is constant time.

At that point though why not use integer constants?

[knodi123]

syntactic sugar- you don't have to pre-declare them or worry about conflicting values. And occasionally the symbol.to_s method is useful in logging or whatnot. That's pretty much it.