Symbols are a very safe way to introduce new "protocols" in either the language standard or for application code. This is because Symbol can never conflict with

Symbols are a very safe way to introduce new "protocols" in either the language standard or for application code. This is because Symbol can never conflict with existing class definitions. If we use a string name for the method, then existing code semantics change. Here are the well-known symbols that my NodeJS 22 offers when I `Symbol.<tab>`: Symbol.asyncDispose Symbol.asyncIterator Symbol.dispose Symbol.hasInstance Symbol.isConcatSpreadable Symbol.iterator Symbol.keyFor Symbol.length Symbol.match Symbol.matchAll Symbol.replace Symbol.search Symbol.species Symbol.split Symbol.toPrimitive Symbol.toStringTag Symbol.unscopables