On 9/6/07, Brian Candler <B.Candler / pobox.com> wrote:
> Quick question - what are the current thoughts about named argument passing
> in future versions of Ruby? I've seen it requested in the past but not much
> in the way of concrete proposals.
>
> Those awfully nice Merb people have just come up with a clever idea, already
> implemented as a small C extension. This lets you reflect on the names of
> arguments in a method definition.

>
> I had a look at http://eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?Changes+in+Ruby+1.9#l4 but
> couldn't see anything along these lines.

What IS in 1.9 is a new literal syntax for hash arguments:

$ irb1.9
irb(main):001:0> def test(arg)
irb(main):002:1>   p arg
irb(main):003:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> test(a: "hello", b: 3)
{:b=>3, :a=>"hello"}
=> nil

as an alternative to:

irb(main):005:0> test(:a => "hello", :b => 3)
{:b=>3, :a=>"hello"}
=> nil

This allows all the current code which uses options hashs as a form of
named parameters to support a new "nicer" caller syntax without
change.
-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/