The important idea here is that since you cannot guarantee the case of a symbol, do not rely on the symbols to have the case you want them to be.
I BELIEVE these may be persistent with the movie, or something...so once you use #booGERhead in a certain dir file, it stays in there somewhere and no amounts of closing and rebooting will make it go away.
I KNOW this is the case. I once saw a file where some student tried the symbol->string thing on the beatles and while John, Ringo and George all came out as expected, paul would not. And there was no *visible* mentioning of #Paul or #paul in the scripts of that .dir file, still, once you had opened it, that director instance would always convert #Paul to "paul".
It took a hex editor and some scanning of the .dir file to discover that the .dir contained parts of a *deleted* script text with [#John, #paul, #George, #Ringo] in it. And for some obscure reason director seemed to scan that cached bit of invisible scripttext on opening the file, update the symbol table accordingly and thusly frustrate said student and his lecturer as well.
Save As and Save and compact : one of them cleaned the snippet away, the other didn't. I'm too lazy to search which was which. So, if in doubt, do them both.
All this was with d5 or d6 so things may have changed, though I doubt they have.
Anyway, just don't do it. In those (rare) cases where I find myself to actually need both the thing as symbol (for speed and elegance) and String (for propper case) I usually trade RAM for (complicated coding // speed) and build me some sort of lookup table.
to summarize:
The important idea here is that since you cannot guarantee the case of a symbol, do not rely on the symbols to have the case you want them to be. ;-)
daniel plaenitz
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