I want to open this for discussion: In all Smalltalk dialects the following expressions evaluate to false: 'abc' = #abc --> false #abc = 'abc' --> false This means a String and a Symbol is never the same thing, even if they contain the same characters. In Squeak/Pharo this is different though (at least this is symmetrical, pre 3.9 this wasn't even symmetrical): 'abc' = #abc --> true #abc = 'abc' --> true Unfortunately this difference makes writing portable code that deals with symbols and strings a huge pain. And it is hard to test, debug and find those kind of problems. I wonder if it would be possible to change that behavior in Squeak to match the other Smalltalk implementations? I guess this would break some code, but at least this problem would then be gone forever. Lukas -- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch