If you mean Ruby's symbols, Python has a data type with that set of properties. It's called 'str'.

If you want the behaviour of Ruby strings, you might use a `bytes` or `bytearray` type, or you might use a list of chars.

I thought Ruby ensured there was only one symbol with given contents, so that equality testing for symbols reduces to pointer equality. I don't Python strings behave that way.

But at any rate I wasn't thinking of performance characteristics but rather the stereotypical uses of symbols vs strings in languages that have both, so you are right that one can use Python strings in place of symbols, as SpaceManiac already pointed out above.

> I thought Ruby ensured there was only one symbol with given contents, so that equality testing for symbols reduces to pointer equality. I don't Python strings behave that way.

In Python, string literals are reused, if that is what you meant.

    >>> a = 'abc'
    >>> b = 'abc'
    >>> a is b
    True

This isn't guaranteed by the language, even if CPython does it. What is guaranteed is intern('abc') is intern('abc').

String literals up to a certain size are reused.

Oh, cool, I didn't know that. I think in Ruby all symbols are reused, whether they are literals or constructed programatically. (Unlike Common Lisp symbols which can also de 'uninterned' if they are not literals.)