Comment by davexunit

Let's use 'attr_reader' as a simple example. It defines a method that returns the value of a member variable. It would be nice to refer to the variable name literally, but this is not possible:

    attr_reader foo

The 'foo' above would evaluate to the contents of the variable 'foo'. So, you have to do this:

    attr_reader :foo

Because we cannot control how this code evaluated, we must quote 'foo'. This greatly limits what we can express.