Ruby - What is the difference between intern and to_sym

Question

They seem to be aliases for the same thing. From the documentation you can see that the sample code of intern uses to_sym:

intern → symbol

Returns the Symbol corresponding to str, creating the symbol if it did not previously exist. See Symbol#id2name.

"Koala".intern         #=> :Koala
s = 'cat'.to_sym       #=> :cat
s == :cat              #=> true
s = '@cat'.to_sym      #=> :@cat
s == :@cat             #=> true

This can also be used to create symbols that cannot be represented using the :xxx notation.

'cat and dog'.to_sym   #=> :"cat and dog"