So, this would mean that

private def foo

end

will now work?

Yes: https://eval.in/49833

Yes. And it is somewhat surprising. Matz must have rejected this idea a dozen times. It was certainly one of the oldest feature requests around. Hard to imagine what must have changed his mind. I've rarely seem Matz change his mind.

I seem to recall the issue was more with returning UnboundMethod objects than with symbols, but possibly what's changed is the fact that now symbols can be GCed?

Please tell us, what's the use case ?

Decorators

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern

It would allow you to do a number things. For instance: `memo def foo` to transform a method into a memoized version.