I thought about mapping Pd symbols directly to Ruby strings instead, which would be slightly less trouble, but it's sort of too late now... Anyway I reserve Ruby's string type to match to the upcoming Pd strings (whatever they will be).
Hmmm, what a coincidence. Luckily, it hasn't been too late for pyext. Thus a Python Symbol type will show up in tomorrow's cvs, speeding up things.
best greetings, Thomas