No. A symbol is basically a constant such as for example HTTP_NOT_FOUND. The difference is that you don’t assign it a number, which means less decisions during development. Another difference is that it will be printed as the string, so no to_string boilerplate.

The other colon path: is used for named parameters/keyword args.

It’s the same syntax as a hash/dict, but as a parameter it does not have a default value in this case.

The old syntax, but still supported for hash/dict was “key => value”

Rust’s string slices are the equivalent of Ruby’s slices of an array: myarr[5..18]