Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> As for why the online Pickaxe doesn't have it, it may be because the 
> hash syntactic sugar is only present since Ruby 1.8, while the online 
> Pickaxe covers Ruby 1.6. But I could be wrong.

It was present in 1.6, too, and the online Pickaxe documents it. See the 
section entitled "Collecting Hash Arguments" at 
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/tut_methods.html.