A java like Enum class for ruby. A while ago I was exploring Java, and came across the Enum class, which had some interesting functionality, and I decided that I would like something like it. Conceptually if you just need a unique identifier you may be perfectly happy using a :symbol, and that would likely be a simpler way of having a controll flag. However, if you want to have a set of unique identifiers that you can address, iterate over, assign properties to, etc, then this may be something you would be interested in.